Strangled with Tulle
by Sweetly Sarcastic
Summary: She's hormonal. He's deranged. If they loved each other any less, they would have killed each other very explosively. Collection of funny, sad, and just completely random Dramione one-shots.
1. Camping with the insane

**_Camping with the Insane_**

Not DH compatible.

First in what will probably become a collection of short Dramione stories. Obviously, I'm not JK Rowling. This is my disclaimer for the whole series. But isn't that the premise of fanfiction, anyway, that you _aren't_ the author and not trying to take credit? I don't quite understand the need for disclaimers. Whatever, I didn't mean to ramble.

* * *

Draco Malfoy had adjusted to the fact that his life ended up nothing like he had pictured as a child. He had even come to like it. After five hours of sitting next to his depressed, exhausted and hormonal wife in the small confines of the car, though, he began to wonder if it really would have been so bad to marry some Pureblood prat he wouldn't have had to talk to ever.

"Hermione, dear, please let me drive," he coaxed his wife for the third time since embarking on the journey.

"Draco, dear, please show me your license," she replied in a similarly saccharine voice, giving a pointed look to her own license, suspended from the rearview window. She didn't drive the muggle car often, and although her husband claimed it was a stupid place to leave the identification, it was convenient.

He grumbled and glared at her. "You know bloody well, dear, that I don't need it."

"Please refrain from using that word in front of our children." Draco rolled his eyes and turned to look at his children. They were all asleep and dead to the world, just as he expected; the car was far too quiet to house waking children.

"They're all asleep, and you're acting like more of a petulant child right now than they are. Let me drive."

"You don't know how."

"I'll just magic it."

"You will do no such thing! This is a strictly muggle trip! Your wand is for emergencies only. That means no using magic to drive, no flying on broom sticks, no enchanted tents, and no slipping the children sleeping draughts!"

"Muggles have medicine that does the same thing, though!" Draco protested, and then the full effect of his wife's words hit him. "Wait, what do you mean, no enchanted tents! You can't possibly mean we're going to be sleeping in real muggle tents in real muggle sleeping bags!"

Her smile was a grim line. "With real muggle rain seeping in through the canvas as you sleep. You better believe it, Malfoy."

"No! No, you do _not _call me by my last name, and we are _not_ sleeping in normal tents!" Glancing in the mirror to the backseat, he quickly added, "do you really want to subject our children to that?"

She refused to look at her imploring husband. "They'll live."

"I am not living like a complete muggle for three days."

"I did it for eleven years."

"Yeah, and look how you turned out!"

She refused the bait and merely glowered, her knuckles turning white on the steering wheel.

He took a breath before asking more calmly, "why?"

She hesitated to answer, because that was more than only semi-serious banter. "Because this is how she would have wanted it to be."

Draco didn't say anything. He knew he shouldn't have said anything in the first place, because he had known it would be an emotional weekend for her, but damnit if her terrible driving didn't make him forget.

They sat in silence. The children slept in the backseat, nestled between various pieces of camping equipment and their own toys. Draco alternated between looking at his stony wife, his placid children, and the dreary view of the rainy English countryside. It was altogether a rather inauspicious beginning to what was sure to be an equally unpleasant weekend. Could spreading the ashes of one's father-in-law ever be pleasant, though?

Draco tried to be unselfish and think of his wife, who was clearly stressed and quickly approaching her snapping point. He was beginning to find it difficult not to be snappish with _her_, though; her father's death had been nearly two years ago, and yet this trip had sent her regressing to the emotional dysfunction of severe grief. He could only deal with her pushing him away for so long.

It didn't help that he felt a twinge of bitter jealously; his own father had never loved Draco as much as her father had obviously loved her. No; his father had forced him to submission with abuse, and then made him to join the forces of the Dark Lord when he was old enough. His childhood had been marked with alternating neglect and loathing.

He looked at his children again, still sleeping peacefully. He couldn't imagine doing the things to them that his father had done to him.

That didn't mean that he had never let his temper get the better him. Once, after watching Scorpius push his sister down the small stone staircase in the garden at the Manor, he had slapped the boy. He'd cried more than his son, though, and had to be convinced that the best thing was not for her to take the children and leave him, because he was in fact not his father. He had been a bit emotional that day.

Parents had always been a bit of a problem in their relationship. When they had met, he had hated her because his parents told him to, meanwhile hers told her to be nice to everyone, which irritated him to no end. Then, six years later, his parents asked him to do the unthinkable; hers supported her decision to interfere. While he had fled from his parents, they had fled to hers together.

The last time Draco saw his father, the bitter old man had expressed his deep desire for the children of the "despicable marriage" to be squibs and die of cholera. Draco hadn't bothered to inform him that cholera hadn't been a problem in muggle England for decades.

His late father-in-law had not been thrilled at his daughter's choice, but he, at least, had come around. Draco had not been unaffected by his passing, but had not been anywhere near as torn-up as his wife had been, which had been a sore spot between them that Draco suspected was less to do with his "not caring" and more to do with her anger at the world, and he was an easy scapegoat. Draco couldn't empathize from personal experience, as he'd given a testimony that helped hasten his own father's trip to the Great Beyond, but he had tried to sympathize.

He discovered that he wasn't very good at sympathizing, especially with a certain brunette who did not want sympathy.

A near-death experience involving a bend in the slippery road and an oncoming lorry snapped him out of his thoughts.

"Hermione, let me drive," he begged again, his fingers wrapped around the wheel.

She slapped the back of his hand and her knuckles turned a deathly shade of white. "Just sit there and shut up, Malfoy."

"What, are we 15 again, _Granger_?"

"Well right now I don't like you much more than I did when we were 15, so maybe, _Malfoy_."

"That's not funny. Pull over right now."

"Do _not_ tell me what to do!"

"And what happens if I don't tell you what to do? You end up killing us all?"

"I am not going to kill us all!"

"_Pull over!"_

"Leave me alone! My driving is fine!"

"No, your driving is _not_ fine, because _you're_ not fine!"

"What are you trying to say? That I'm a psycho bitch?"

"Right now? Yeah, you are."

"Yeah, well you're a terrible husband! One long weekend, Malfoy, just three days, is all I wanted to say goodbye to my dad one last time! And I don't even want to do this, and I can barely stomach the thought of scattering his ashes over the lake where we used to go fishing, but my mum asked me to because she can't go, and she wants to make sure it's done before she's gone, because even she knows that she's not doing well, and that the tumors aren't responding to the chemo and that I'm going to have to say goodbye to her soon too!"

"Hermione…"

"No, don't you start with me! I get it, and I understand that my relationship with my parents makes you uncomfortable because it's not what you grew up with, but they're my parents and I love them and I'm not about to pretend that I'm not affected just to make you feel more at ease! Do you even care about my parents at all?" He knew he should have been concerned for her, but his most eminent concern was The Speedometer of Death. She was losing control, and he knew that there was no stopping the dam that was about to break; he just needed to keep his children out of danger of the flood.

"Hermione, I'm sorry, love. Now please pull over and let me drive!"

"No! Do you even love me, Draco, or did you just marry me because I was the first person who genuinely cared about you? God, you're just like Conn from The Sun Also Rises, aren't you? And I'm just the first wife that you have three children with and then never mention again!"

He knew he should comfort her, but she'd provoked his temper and he couldn't help retorting with the first thing that unfortunately came to mind. "Well, I don't know; are you planning to leave me? Because remember, Conn's first wife left him for a miniature painter!"

"So you're calling me a slut now!"

"Mummy, what's a slut?"

Draco turned to face his children and, to his consternation, found that all three pairs of angelic eyes were open. "Nevermind, sweetheart," Draco cooed to the middle child, Rose, wedged tightly between her brothers. "It's just a silly made-up word that mummy uses when she's upset."

He couldn't believe Hermione said it; she was always scolding him about language in front of the children—she must have been really upset.

"Hermione, please pull over," he asked softly, trying not to make a scene in front of his children.

"You haven't answered any of my questions. Do you even love me? Why did you bother to marry me if you so obviously can't stand me? Do you even care that I'm upset or are you too busy sulking because this ruins your long weekend of pointless quidditch matches and gambling with the boys?"

"Hermione, let's not do this now," he urged.

"No, Draco, let's do this now! Now's a good a time as any to discover that the man I married hates me! So tell me, when you said "for better or for worse" in your wedding vows, you only really meant "for better", didn't you? Because you don't like psychotic Hermione at all. It's not worth having all the STD-free sex you want if you have to put up with a crazy mudblood like me!"

"Stop it, just stop it! You know I love you, damnit! Stop pushing me away!"

"Oh, you haven't seen "pushing you away" yet!"

"Hermione, for Merlin's sake, pull the damn car over!"

"Why, because I'm in no shape to drive?"

"Yes!"

"Well you're an asshole!"

"Merlin, Hermione, not in front of the kids!"

"They might as well know that mummy and daddy don't like each other!"

"That's not true! Damnit, Hermione, pull over, right now!"

He was shocked when she slammed on the breaks suddenly. She unlocked the car door for him, then put the car in park.

"Fine, get out," she said quietly.

He moved uncertainly, afraid of doing the wrong this and provoking her fury once again, but afraid of getting out of the car. He didn't move.

Frustrated, she reached across him to open his door. Slowly, he got out. His foot was still in the door when she slammed the gear shift into drive and stepped on the accelerator, his open door slapping shut as he yelled at her in the distance.

Scorpius began to undo his seatbelt and scream, but she merely pressed down on the pedal harder and jabbed the childlock button.

"Scorpius, put your seatbelt back on." He didn't want to, but his mother's tone terrified him into submission.

"But mum, what about dad?" He asked, his lip trembling. Rose's eyes were already wide with tears, and Hermione knew that if the toddler understood what was happening, he would be crying too. They all were.

"Mum, what about dad?" Scorpius asked again.

"You will never see your father again!" Hermione snapped.

"No! No, mum, I want dad!"

When Scorpius began to sob controllably, Hugo, frightened, began to cry and scream as well. Like her mother, Rose sobbed silently.

Hermione's grip on the wheel loosened as she wept, and her foot forgot about the accelerator. Once the car had stopped again, she rested her forehead against the wheel as she held her head in her hands.

She wasn't sure how much later it was that she heard the footsteps outside her door, but she found that by the time she had mustered the common sense to panic about highway vagabonds and crazy serial killers, the door was already open.

Sopping wet from the rain, Draco pulled her out of the driver's seat. She didn't resist and fell into his open arms. He was surprisingly warm. Or maybe she was just surprisingly cold and numb.

"Sh…" he whispered into her hair as he kissed the top of her head. "It's alright."

But he was crying too, and damnit, Draco Malfoy did not cry!

They stood entwined by the side of the highway, her head on his shoulder as her tears purged all her anger and spite.

"I'm sorry," she whispered as she began to pull away.

"No, babe, I'm sorry, I should have shut up. I know I'm not good at being supportive, and I should be, because you need and deserve it."

"I'm sorry I left you on the side of the highway," she sniffled.

"I'm sorry I cursed at you and let you doubt that I love you," he whispered.

"I'm sorry I doubted that you loved me."

"I'm sorry I wasn't sensitive."

"I'm sorry I was a bitch."

"If you were a bitch, I was a complete asshole. I'm sorry, love."

She looked at him with the wounded puppy look and fell back into his arms. The embrace was almost painful and smothering, but nothing else would have sufficed. "I love you," she whispered.

"I love you too," he whispered back.

They stood on the highway another few minutes before Scorpius finally figured out how to climb into the driver's seat and escape the vehicle, and Rose followed.

"Daddy!" She yelled and tugged on his father's pants. Draco separated from his wife just long enough to pick up his son and then his daughter before Hermione wrapped her arms around the three of them.

They were still a family, and no amount of screaming and crying would change that.

* * *

When the family finally stopped to set up camp that night, Hermione had fallen into a silent sorrow. The children were awake, but strangely quiet; Draco guessed they were all a bit too traumatized for their normal antics.

Draco and Hermione pitched the muggle tents without another word or complaint from him. While her back was turned to start the fire, though, he cast wordless spells to protect the two little tents from the cold and the rain. He could do this her way to a certain extent, but letting his children and wife sleep in the rainy cold was where he drew the line. Her health was extra-important these days, whether or not she realized it. Besides, if she didn't know about the charms, there was no harm done.

They fed the children hot dogs but didn't have any appetites themselves. It was barely eight, but they put the children to bed. They didn't protest, though Scorpius refused to let his mother kiss him goodnight, which earned him a glare from his father. Apparently, Hermione was not quite completely forgiven yet.

Hermione and Draco barely cleaned up the campsite before falling into their own double sleeping bag. However, two hours later, they were both still very much wide awake.

"Hermione?" Draco murmured, his face in her hair as they spooned.

"Yes?"she whispered groggily, but he knew she hadn't been sleeping, just wishing that she had been sleeping. Sleep hadn't been coming easily to either lately.

"Are you okay?"

She shifted in his arms so she could rest her head on his chest. "I… I don't know. I'm just so exhausted, and worried, and emotionally drained, and I feel physically horrible because I know I'm letting down everyone: my mom wishes I had done this sooner so she could have come, and I know I keep hurting you, and Scorpius hates me right now, and Rose just feels betrayed, and god knows my dad would be disappointed if he knew how I was handling everything."

Her hot tears soaked through his shirt quickly, and he realized that it was the pivotal moment for them, because she was once again vulnerable and in need of his strength and sympathy for the first time since Hugo's birth, right after her father's death. His reaction would determine whether or not she continued to push him away or not.

"Look, 'Mione, your mother loves and forgives you. _I _love and forgive you. The kids are young, and they'll forget soon enough, because you're a terrific mother and you love them. And your father would never be disappointed in you. It's understandable for you to be upset, but don't think you're close to losing any of us; we're not going anywhere."

She sniffled again and hesitated. "They screamed for you when I drove away, but I didn't listen. I'm a terrible mother. What kind of woman screams and cusses at her husband with her kids in the backseat of the car? They shouldn't have seen that. That's awful."

Draco privately agreed that it was fairly awful, but didn't think it prudent to say so. Years with Hermione had taught him that sometimes the first thing to pop into his head was _not_ the best thing to say. "It's okay," he said. "They'll get over it. Everything will work out, Hermione. I promise."

It was quiet for another few minutes save the pitter pattering of rain on the tent. "I love you," she said suddenly.

"I love you too," he murmured into her hair as she kissed the top of her head. He almost felt like they were caught in time, repeating the same actions over and over again and getting nowhere.

She kissed the wet spot on his shirt and rolled back over, ready to fall asleep, but she didn't. It was another fifteen minutes before she spoke up again.

"Draco?" she whispered.

"Yes, love?"

"I'm pregnant."

He felt her nervousness and he hesitated. "I know."

She twisted in his arms again to look in his eyes despite the darkness. "What? How?"

"You're been pregnant three times before, dear. I saw the signs."

"Oh," she paused. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"Because I didn't think it would be wise to inform you that you were pregnant if you didn't know yourself, and I was afraid that if you did know, you weren't telling me for a reason."

"A reason like what?" It slipped out like an innocent question, but they both knew it wasn't.

He answered truthfully anyway, after a moment. "I was afraid you didn't want me to know. I was afraid you were still pushing me away. I was afraid… you were going to leave me."

She can't find the words to say. "I… I'm sorry. I shouldn't have let you believe that."

"It's okay. Really, 'Mione. Just go to sleep. You need to rest." He wrapped his arms around her and counted the breaths it took her to fall asleep. It wasn't as many as he expected; she must have been terribly exhausted.

When the lightning and thunder began, she did not wake up. He didn't expect her to; she never did. He hadn't been able to fall asleep in the first place, and certainly wouldn't be able to fall asleep after the storm began.

He grabbed his wand when the silhouette of two people appeared with the crack of lightning right outside the tent, but then the flap unzipped and he saw Scorpius standing there, half-dragging and half-carrying his little brother with one hand and his sleeping bag in the other.

"I'm not scared, dad," Scorpius said quickly. "But Hugo was. So I brought him." Draco saw through the excuse and made room for his sons. Their sleeping bag dried magically as it entered the tent, and Draco was glad to have cast the spell. Hermione would understand, if she figured it out.

"You might as well stay, then," Draco told his older son, indulging in his son's false sense of courage, as he situated them in the now slightly cramped tent.

It wasn't until the boys were almost asleep that he realized something was wrong.

"Scorpius?"

"Yeah, dad?"

"Never leave your sister somewhere you're afraid to be alone yourself." With that, Draco got out of the sleeping bag and made his way across the tent, careful not to step on any fingers or toes. He grimaced at the cold outside the tent but drudged onwards anyway.

Rose was still sleeping in the tent, oblivious to the thunder that had woken her brothers. Draco smiled and thought about how much like her mother she was. He wouldn't have it any other way.

He bent to pick her up, sleeping bag and all. It was then that her little eyelids fluttered and she looked up at him.

"Daddy?" She whispered.

"Yes, baby?" He replied as he maneuvered them out of the tent.

"Are you and mummy going to break up?"

He kissed his daughter's forehead. "No, baby. Don't you worry, just go back to sleep."

"Mmkay," she murmured as her eyes drifted shut again. He set her down gently beside her mother before crawling back into his sleeping bag on the other side of Hermione. He wrapped his arms around wife, his palm flat against her stomach. He imagined he could feel the baby in her womb, just beneath the skin.

Four kids. They were about to have four kids. Somehow, he couldn't fathom anything better.

* * *

The sun was nearly at its zenith when they reached the middle of the lake. The day was surprisingly clear, and eerily still. They'd managed to get the small old motor boat to actually work, though it was exasperatingly slow.

Scorpius had already pushed his sister into the water, which earned him a punishment he was equally unhappy with, and Hermione had reluctantly conceded to a drying charm for Rose, and then a silencing charm after the loud motor had terrified Hugo to tears.

"'Mione, do you want to say a few words?" Draco asked awkwardly. If there was a proper procedure for discarding the ashes of one's family, Draco did not know it.

"You go first," she said softly.

"Um… well, David was a great guy. He was a good father to Hermione, and a good father-in-law to me, even though I didn't deserve it, because we both knew that I didn't deserve his daughter. And he was a loving, doting grandfather. He lived a good, full life that most people only wish to have. He was humble, kind and caring. We were all lucky to have him in our lives." He squeezed his wife's hand and looked to his son. "Scorpius, do you want to say anything about your grandfather?"

The little blond boy nodded solemnly, his demeanor changed drastically from the petulant child he had been that morning. "Poppy was the best Poppy," he announced. "He told the best jokes and took me fishing once and it was really fun. And we made s'mores at his house when Hugo was borned. It was really fun too. He was really fun. I loved Poppy."

Not to be outdone, Rose stood up to talk about her grandfather next, although she'd been only two when he passed. "Poppy gave the best hugs," she said adamantly. "And Poppy told good stories. I was Poppy's favorite granddaughter, and he was my favorite Poppy."

"That's only 'cause you were his _only_ granddaughter, stupid!" Scorpius cut in.

"Scorpius, do not use that word," Draco corrected his son. "Apologize to your sister."

"Sorry, Rose," he said dutifully.

"I forgive you," Rose told him simply.

"Hermione…" Draco prompted. They should have discussed how they planned to do this.

"Okay." She took a deep breath to steady herself, and then began. "David Granger was my father, and I can't imagine anyone else being a better father to me. He was also caring and supportive, and even when my becoming a witch and going to Hogwarts completely changed life as he knew it, he accepted it and he accepted _me_. He never thought I was a freak, like I did, and encouraged me to embrace the world I belonged to. He accepted my position in the war without fuss, and when I fell in love with someone I was supposed to hate, he accepted that too. He loved my children like he loved me. He was the kind of grandfather to my children that his father was to me, and I'm glad they had him in their lives, and if I could trade all my experiences with my grandfather so that they got have just one more day with theirs, I would, because they deserve it, and so does he.

"And my father was a good husband. He didn't forget birthdays and anniversaries, and he didn't like mum to brag about what a great man he was. He really cared about my mum, and he wasn't perfect, but he was close. I watched other couples fight and argue, but never them. I never worried they would break up like the other children's parents. They weren't boring or dull, they just discussed things without anger.

"And my father was a good son, and a good brother. He took care of his mother and father until they passed, and he had a relationship with his sister that makes me wish I had a brother. He loved the people in his life and treated them well, and I was lucky to have him in my life. I loved him, and he will forever be missed."

Draco leaned forward to wipe the tears from her eyes. "How do you want to spread the ashes?" he asked softly.

"I don't know!" She said tearfully as her voice cracked. "You do it!"

"Okay…" He took the urn from her hands unsurely, but then she grabbed it back.

"No, no, I should do this."

She stood tentatively in the little boat as she struggled to unscrew the cap. Draco put a hand on her waist to steady her, and then she took a deep breath and began to sprinkle the ashes into the dark, still water. He watched as the surface turned cloudy and the ashes sank into the darkness.

When the ashes were gone, Hermione screwed the cap back on and sat down on the bench between her two children and lifted the toddler into her lap. Rose wrapped her little pudgy arms around her mother, and Scorpius conceded to lean into her side. Draco left them alone and started the motor again to go to shore. Being in the middle of the dark, placid lake beneath the endless icy sky without a single outside sound was a bit disconcerting. The whole trip had been disconcerting.

When they got back to the camp much later, they fell into their normal routine as much as possible. The children were fed, then bathed in the creek, then set to dry and warm up by the fire while drinking some warm milk before going to bed. It was a tad early, but the children seemed to have agreed implicitly that arguing for an extra ten minutes or another bedtime story would not be in their best interests. Well, either that or they were really desperate to escape their gloomy parents.

Draco and Hermione had given up on the second tent, and instead had taken down what had been the children's tent. They packed what they could for the morning, when they'd leave nearly at the crack of dawn, before climbing into the cramped tent themselves.

The children had been sleeping, and in Scorpius's case, snoring, for nearly half an hour when Hermione finally prodded her husband back into consciousness. He hadn't been sleeping, though he had been close, but he refused to let himself be annoyed with her again. Instead, he rolled over and caught her shining eyes with his own.

"What is it, love?" He asked softly, almost afraid of what her answer would be.

"You're not allowed to do this to me," she told him, her voice quaking. "You are not allowed to die, ever, and you are not allowed to ask to be cremated, and you are not allowed to ask me, or anyone else, scatter your ashes. You can't do that to me; I won't be able to take it."

"Hermione…" he swiped his thumb under her eyes to catch the falling tears and then rubbed her arm soothingly.

"No, you listen to me, Draco Malfoy," she continued emphatically. "And I think maybe I'd like our ashes to be scattered together, but I am not doing this to any of our children. This is too difficult."

"Hermione, saying goodbye to the people you love was never meant to be easy, but we do it anyway because the people we love are worth it."

She sniffled and snuggled closer. "_He_ was worth this," she whispered. "_You're _worth this. _I'm_ not."

He kissed her forehead and pulled her closer. "Love, you've given me three beautiful, healthy children, and you're about to go through the agony of childbirth once more. Never mind your kind heart, nurturing ways, unwavering faith, endless hope, constant love, inexhaustible source of strength; that alone is enough to merit you all the heartbreak in the world."

She shook her head. "I don't want their pain. I don't want them to feel like this. _I _don't want to feel like this again in a few months, because my mother _is_ dying, Draco, whether or not you'll believe it. I just… there was pain and heartbreak and loss and mourning after the war, but it was never like this for me. It was never this personal. I don't know how the wizarding community has gone on."

He kissed her tear-stained cheeks again and prayed that he would find the right words to say. "The same way you have, the same way you will. You're stronger than you know, love, and I'm always here for you."

"What about when you're not? What if you go first?"

He would have given up half his gold at Gringotts- and even half was a good deal- to stop that conversation. He didn't want to think about their deaths. Whenever his thoughts had turned to that, he forced himself to think about something else. He refused to think that one day she would be gone, irrevocably, forever torn from him, or that some day he wouldn't be there to argue with her for absolutely no reason but to have incredible make-up sex afterwards, or to prepare her tea exactly the way she liked it in order to coax her out of their warm bed on the cold mornings. Who would wake her up from her nightmares and then hold her as she cried? Who would give her flowers and books and chocolates randomly, just because she liked them? Who would –heaven forbid- put on her muggle dresses so she could make sure the hem was straight as she sewed it, and then insist she use magic instead of that blasted needle and thread after she pricked her finger (it'd only been once, but he'd be willing to repeat the experience if it meant he could escape the vile thoughts bombarding his mind). Who would love and care for her?

"I'm not going first," he decided first. "We're going to be like that couple from that horrible muggle movie you made us watch, _The Journal_ or something, and we're going to die together and never live apart."

She tried to push away from him, despite the fact that his arms were keeping her locked in an embrace and he had no intention of moving. She was obviously annoyed, and he was not surprised to have said the wrong thing. "Really, Draco, please be serious."

He sighed, exasperated. "I am being serious, love: I refuse to imagine my life without you, because I _have _no life without you, and I refuse to believe that someday I will not be there to love and care for you."

And then she started crying all over again, tears of sorrow and fear and worry, and he rubbed her back in an attempt to calm her. For the first time, he decided he might have done something right, and that maybe, she would stop blocking him out on the topic of death. Maybe that godforsaken camping trip could be the turning point in their bout of marital depression.

* * *

The next morning, the sky was barely orange, the sun having only just appeared over the horizon, when they began to closing up their campsite to leave. They worked silently as a team, he taking the heavier pieces, she packing things into bags and boxes and keeping the children occupied. They were a well oiled machine.

When everything had been stowed in the car, Hermione lingered in front of the abandoned camp site, looking at everything distantly, a faraway look in her eye as she thought about life and death and everything in between. Once he got the children settled, still half-asleep, in the backseat, he wrapped his arms around her waist and rested her chin on her shoulder, trying to imagine what she saw when she looked at the landscape.

"We're never coming back here," she told him. "Never."

"No," he agreed. The place had too many bad memories attached to it now. They could change that, if they wanted to, if they needed to, but they didn't; they didn't need to be okay with going there again, and they wouldn't try to be okay with it.

When she was ready, she let him lead her to the car. She stopped short, though, and gave him a funny look. He was about to ask what she was thinking when she reached into her pocket to procure something metallic before placing it in his hands.

Keys in hand, Draco Malfoy drove his family home.

* * *

It was better in my head. Review anyway please!


	2. Ouch

Epilogue compliant! And based off my real life failed attempt to be Betty Crocker.

* * *

**_Ouch_**

"Ow," she whimpered.

He stopped, partially shocked. He hadn't even gotten to the violent part yet; he'd just been pulling her shirt off. "What?" He whispered.

"Sorry, keep going, it's just my elbow, I burned it, no big deal, I'm fine," she said in a quick stream of words, unable to form long and complex sentences.

"What?" He finished pulling her shirt off and took her left arm in his hand, his previous ministrations forgotten, despite the fact that he was still half-straddling her lap. His fingers ghosted up her arm.

"No, this elbow," she said, pulling away her left arm but offering her right. It was tilted at a slightly uncomfortable angle so he could see the burn on the inside of her elbow.

"What happened?" He asked, curious, carefully inspecting and then kissing the sensitive flesh. His cool lips mitigated the pain and he returned her arm to its normal, comfortable position.

"I burned it," she stated again, her senses too dulled with desire to care that it was a stupid, obvious answer.

He chuckled. "I know, love, but how?"

Her mind was clearing now that he was no longer touching her. She loved making love to him, but she also loved those rare moments when he showed not just his passion, but his compassion, when he proved that he more than lusted for her, that he actually cared.

She just wished it weren't so embarrassing. "I was making cupcakes and when I wasn't careful pulling them out of the oven, and so my elbow hit the door."

He compulsively kissed her forehead and smiled, because, despite her encyclopedic knowledge of everything, she was still only human. He felt bad that she was hurt, but it was endearing. "And why were you making cupcakes?"

"Rose's birthday is tomorrow," she told him. It was an implicit rule that they minimalized references to their outside lives, but he had asked.

The guilt that usually accompanied mentioning their children, the guilt she was expecting from him, was not there. Instead, he looked surprised. "Why didn't you tell me!" He exclaimed. "I haven't gotten her a gift!"

She smiled. "That's not necessary."

"Of course it is! I bought Hugo a present for his birthday- it's only fair that I buy Rose one as well! I am a family friend, after all." His sly smile hinted at their old joke that they were very good family friends. Although if either of their spouses found out what they were up to- or down to- in secret closets and dark rooms, they could pretty much bank on not being family friends anymore. No, they could pretty much bank on being dead.

She smoothed his hair back and smiled, sitting up to face him. She loved that he cared for her children. "No, really, you don't need to get Rose a gift, because Scorpius is coming to her party and so your family is already giving her a gift."

He glared. "No, that just means that Astoria has probably picked out something awful. She hates that I make her be nice to your family, even though it's really for her son's sake."

She was vaguely amused, even if she wanted to claw out Astoria's eyes. "I'm sure it will be lovely."

His intense grey eyes turned to hers suddenly. "Hey, why wasn't I told that Rose was having a birthday party?"

She rolled her eyes. He could be so tempestuous. "Blame your wife; I know she got the invitation, because she already RSVPed for the three of you. It's not my fault she didn't tell you."

"Actually, it is," he told her, a devilish grin adorning his pale face.

"What? No, it's not—I have no control over the invitation once it's sent." She was genuinely perplexed about how that was her fault, and he found it adorable.

"Yes, _but_ if you hadn't come along and made me realize that I could feel so much more alive than I do with my wife, said wife and I would be on much better terms. I might even still be talking to her for a whole five minutes a day."

She snorted in a very un-ladylike fashion. "Love, you didn't need me to realize that you married the biggest prat in the world and you were unhappy."

He smiled and pushed her back into the bed. They'd managed to sneak her into the manor this time, as Astoria was not due to back until tomorrow morning, right before the birthday party.

"Why don't you show me how happy I am now," he asked suggestively.

It was wrong, of course. They each had their own excuses, and truthfully, their spouses were probably up to the same (and feeling far less guilty about it), but they knew that when it boiled down to it, their affair was wrong, no matter how right it felt to be together.

* * *

"Ron, please pour punch into the glasses. And remember, the yellow cups are for adults and the green ones are for children, so make sure you don't put alcohol in those. And keep the yellow cups on the high tables so the children can't reach them."

"Merlin, Hermione, I'm not a complete dunce, you know," he muttered bitterly. He'd be glad when the party had started and she'd gotten a few drinks in her system. Although if he started drinking early, he'd be one step closer to not caring that the witch was driving him insane. Yes, he definitely planned on getting quite smashed.

"Ow!" Hermione cried suddenly, dropping the pile of cookie sheet she was about to use to make appetizers for the adults. It clanged loudly as it hit the ground, and he husband stared at her. "I burned by elbow," she explained sheepishly. He hadn't asked, but she couldn't stand that look he was giving her, like she was clinically insane.

His brows furrowed in further confusion. "Oh what? You're not even cooking yet."

She laughed nervously. She hated it when he made her feel stupid—if anything, it was quite the opposite. "No, yesterday," she explained. "When I was making cupcakes for the children. On the oven door. It was quite stupid." Under his dull glare, that silent accusation of her incompetence, she was reduced to nervousness that was quite unlike that pleasing butterfly feeling she had felt when he had been courting her.

He set down the punch bowl and walked towards her. Without warning, he grabbed the injured arm and examined the offending wound. "It's not that bad," he proclaimed, not noticing that the appendage was twisted at an angle so unnatural to her that she was forced to bend her torso to maintain some level of relative comfort. She pulled the limb back as soon as she could. "Do you want me to get that burn salve you made?"

The request was made more from routine than concern. What she wanted was for his lips to sooth the singed nerves, but that wasn't something he did. Maybe if he were the kind of man to alleviate her burns with kisses, she wouldn't be with Draco. Then again, there were many things Draco was and Ron wasn't, and she had every intention of learning the exact extent of their differences.

* * *

If only Draco would kiss the burn on the inside of _my_ elbow... I like reviews more than frosting on the cake!


	3. Oreos

Epilogue compliant!

Right now, it thunders,

And the sandman despises me,

Enjoy the product!

* * *

**_Oreos_**

Hermione walked into the pantry and promptly walked out. The oreos were very egregiously missing.

"Draco?" She called into the quiet house.

Her husband strolled into the kitchen, a newspaper in one hand. "Yes, dear?"

"What happened to the oreos?" She asked suspiciously. House elves did not eat oreos. Not even _her_ house elves, who had been trained to stop fearing their master and take care of themselves properly.

"What oreos?" He asked innocently, putting his paper down and kissing her forehead.

"The ones… are those oreo crumbs on your chin?" She grabbed his chin to inspect the offending crumbs before he could pull away.

"Couldn't be," he told her dismissively, wiping his hand across his mouth and effectively removing the evidence.

"Draco!" She admonished.

"What?"

"Those were for the children, and though you may act like a tempestuous child, you aren't one!" She scolded. "Oreos are Rose's favorite, and I wanted to make this trip home special for the children!"

He rolled his eyes. "Love, you can feed them all the cake and cookies and candy you want—sending them into diabetic comas won't placate them."

She huffed. "No, but maybe it would help!" Though the wedding had been over the Christmas holidays, this would be the first time that all three children would be staying at home with their parents. It was making Hermione quite nervous. Visions of screaming, fighting children danced through her head, and her husband was too amused at the thought of squabbling step-children to mitigate her worries. It was definitely going to be an interesting summer.

He laughed and she punched him in the gut. No ribs were bruised, but it was surprisingly painful. "Hey!"

"Hey!" She mimicked angrily before pulling muggle money out of her pocket and slapping it into his hand. "Go to the grocery store and buy a new package of oreos. Get the ones with the special holiday icing. They're blue. The packaging will be exactly the same as the package that you _stole_."

He sighed. The momentary satisfaction of eating the entire parcel of cookies was not worth his wife's wrath. Plus, the stomach ache only exacerbated the situation, but he figured that asking for a soothing potion would only earn him a glare. Honestly, it was just the children coming home from Hogwarts; it wasn't as bad a panic situation as when Narcissa decided to "grace" them with her presence.

"What if they don't have them?" He asked, partially out of curiosity and partially to annoy her.

"Then I guess you better not come home tonight. Or ever."

He made a face at her, and she stuck her tongue out at him. In the next instant, though, her tongue was down his throat and she stood still, shocked, before the sneaky bastard pulled back away and smiled mischievously.

"I'll be back soon," he called out as he headed toward the front door.

She didn't move, then snapped out of it and repressed her urge to continue the kiss. They'd known each other for over 20 years and dated for 3, and yet he still managed to surprise her. She smiled at the thought.

"You better be back in time to pick them up at the station!" She hollered, remembering herself before the door slammed.

She knew he only did things to annoy her because he liked seeing her flustered. She had other ways of catching his attention.

* * *

Draco returned with the oreos, because even he knew that right now, something as simple as oreos could set off his frazzled wife.

He set the grocery bag down beside her in the kitchen as she finished icing the red velvet cake for Scorpius.

"Did you get the oreos?" She asked absently as she carefully eyed the frosting, as if Scorpius would actually analyze the aesthetics of the cake and the rest of their relationship would be determined based on whether or not the cream cheese frosting was evenly distributed over the cake.

"I did come home, didn't I?" He jested before kissing the back of her head, careful not to jostle her; he'd never hear the end of it if he did.

She looked up from the cake and glanced at the bag he was holding before looking at him curiously. "What else did you get?"

He extracted a small white bottle from the opaque plastic bag and held it up for her to see.

"Draco Malfoy, why on earth did you buy midol?"

He grinned cheekily. "Well, love, I thought it might help with the mood swings."

The little bottle was promptly thrown at his head.

* * *

Draco and Hermione stood on Platform 9¾, anxiously waiting for the train to arrive. They were relatively lucky; Astoria was out of the country with her latest paramour and wouldn't be there even if she had remembered, and Ron had written her only the night before that he wouldn't be able to get off work as planned. Of course, both ex-spouses would give them hell later, but for now, they only had to contend with pulling a family together. Compared to dealing with the bitch satan spawned, becoming the picture-perfect little wizarding family would be a piece of cake. _Red velvet_ cake.

Hermione squeezed the life out of Draco's hand when the steam from the train became visible on the horizon.

"Hermione," he whimpered. "Hermione, my hand."

She released him, but only a little. She was too excited, too nervous. God, what if they all hated each other? What if they wrote to their other parents, demanded to be picked up immediately? A million different scenarios ran through her head, each equally unpleasant, if not more unpleasant than the last. She almost dreaded the oncoming train bringing her children closer to her.

"What if," she began nervously, but he cut her off quickly.

"Love, everything will be fine."

"I'm sorry, I didn't realize you had such a predilection for divination," she said sarcastically, not because she was in the mood to gibe, but because that was what they did. It was almost routine.

"Merlin, Hermione, they're just children, not serial killers," he laughed nervously. "What's the worst that could happen?"

But Hermione could think of a lot of terrible things that could happen.

She didn't have time to argue her aggression out with him, because it was then that she realized someone was calling for her down the platform.

"Harry!" She squealed and embraced her friend. His wife was very noticeably missing, but she didn't ask questions. She didn't have to; she'd lost quite a few friends due to the divorce, and she would have been stupid to expect Ginny to "pick" her over Ginny's own brother. In fact, only immediate family had been invited to the wedding so Hermione didn't have to come to terms with the fact that she had very few friends who supported the match. As in, none.

"Hermione!" He exclaimed. However, once the excitement of reuniting passed, it was rather awkward for both of them. They hadn't really spoken since she had divorced his best friend. "Hello, Draco," he said politely out of an attempt to fill the uncomfortable silence.

"Harry," Draco said and nodded.

The awkward silence did not resume for the simple reason that Ginny had stalked over and grabbed Harry by his tie before leading him away angrily. Hermione surmised that she was not quite forgiven yet.

She and Draco watched as the other couple argued and gesticulated wildly, causing quite a scene. Though the words did not carry through the din of the train station, Hermione could imagine that it was something along the lines of…

"_Why were you talking to that whore? She's dead to us!" _

"_She was my friend!"_

"_Before she broke my brother's heart! Your best friend, you arsehole! Don't fraternize with the enemy!"_

Yes, Hermione could imagine it was going quite well. Her husband pulled her in for a quick hug and whispered reassurances into her ear.

"Blue canary," she told him suddenly.

"What?" he looked confused, but to his credit, did not look at her like she was crazy as Ron always had.

"That's our code word," she clarified. "If I'm ever being an overbearing shrew and attempting to cut you off from your friends unreasonably, just yell "blue canary" and I'll attempt to stop being a bitch."

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. "Attempt, huh?"

She smiled sheepishly in return. "Well, I may just burst out sobbing, depending on the context, given that you will, essentially, be calling me a complete bitch."

"You? Never," he said teasingly. She moved to whack him upside the head, but he was too quick for her, and laced her fingers with his to jerk her closer to him so he could press a quick kiss on her lips.

"I love you," she said suddenly and sincerely.

"I love you too," he replied without hesitation before kissing her again, this time tenderly.

Their antics were sadly interrupted, though, by the whistle announcing the approaching train.

They continued to hold hands nervously as the train came into view. Despite his attempts to calm her with a calculated touch to the small of her back or reassuring word, she knew he was worried too; their family would be together for the first time today, and maybe the last, if they all killed each other.

Though they both hoped desperately it wouldn't come to that.

By the time the train pulled into the station, their knuckles were white.

They watched the stream of children pilling off the train, their eyes searching everywhere at once.

"Scorpius!" Draco called suddenly, and he directed Hermione's attention to their far left and the little blonde boy who was dragging enough trunks for a small army. Even from a distance, she could tell that he had grown and his clothes no longer fit right. She made a quick mental note to take him shopping.

Draco squeezed her hand comfortingly before rushing to greet his son. Hermione only stood there alone for a few moments more before spotting Hugo to her right. He looked like he was drowning in his luggage as well, and she went to help him.

By the time she had properly nearly suffocated her son and taken him to the meeting spot, Draco, Scorpius and Rose were already waiting for them. Hermione gave Rose her own hug of death before hugging Scorpius as well. His hug was not as bone-crushing, but was still a step above the handshake he had attempted to initiate.

"Well, we're all here," Draco announced cheerily, easily slipping into the happy father role. "Everyone ready to go home?"

The three children looked at him with similar looks of nonchalance and horror. It was almost as if they had been told they were all going to be flogged by pygmy puffs.

* * *

Dinner had been surprisingly quiet. It was Terrible Situation #16 in Hermione's head: _the children refuse to speak because they hate us for what we've done and we have psychologically scarred them for life by forcing the marriage upon them. _

There was a bit of talking, though, in the form of "how's school?" "fine". That had been the highlight of the conversation for the evening.

"So… um…" Hermione began, anxious to fill the silence, but overly selective in topics; she couldn't bore them with details about her job and didn't want to talk about the honeymoon because that would be gross and only further shove the relationship in their faces. Good lord, why hadn't they just waited to get married? The kids should have had more time to adjust. Like, maybe when they had their own kids to worry about and couldn't be arsed about their parents any longer.

Rose suddenly stopped bothering to play with her food absently and dropped her fork with a loud clang. "Are you pregnant?" She asked suddenly, her face flushed with embarrassment.

The room resonated with the sounds of everyone else's forks dropping to their plates as well. It couldn't have been scripted more comically, but no one was laughing. "What? No!" Hermione answered quickly, more embarrassed than her daughter, though she blushed less. "Rose!"

"So you aren't pregnant now, and you weren't pregnant when you married my dad," Scorpius asked quickly.

"No!" Draco answered, a bit embarrassed as well but doing the best job at concealing it. "It was not a shot-gun wedding! Merlin, Scorpius!"

"And you're not planning to get pregnant, right?" Rose asked.

"No!" Hermione exclaimed, then blushed. "Well. Maybe. Someday. But probably not."

Draco was equally shaken. "Yes, probably not."

"You don't even _know_?" Scorpius yelled. "Aren't you supposed to discuss things like this before you get married? I mean, for Merlin's sake, what if you wanted ten kids and she was done unnaturally shoving things out of unspeakable orifices?"

"Do you have to be so crude!" Rose chastised as she grimaced. That was not a pleasant image.

"Um, I suppose we would discuss it and come to a logical decision. But that's not an issue because we aren't having children," Hermione answered for her husband.

"We aren't?" Draco asked, perplexed. Hadn't that conclusion been less definite moments before?

"Aren't we?" Hermione retorted.

"What?" His face contorted with confusion.

"Aren't we not having children?" She clarified.

"Don't use double negatives! They're confusing!" He exclaimed. "And I don't know, nothing's definite. Do you want to have more children?"

And then the reality of their dinner table talk hit her. "God, Draco, we should not be having this conversation in front of our children!"

"Merlin, please don't!" Scorpius interjected.

Draco's temper got the better of him "You need to-"Draco began, before being cut off by his wife.

"Who wants dessert?" She asked loudly, interrupting what would have led to a rousing and terrifying father-son screaming match.

She dashed into the kitchen and returned, precariously balancing a piece of cake, a bowl of ice cream, and a tray of oreos in her hands. She looked at the nearly empty dining room, though, and dropped the dishes onto the table with a clatter.

"Where did everyone go?" She bewilderedly asked the only remaining person, Hugo.

He shrugged his shoulders and reached for the ice cream, which his mother pushed across the table to him.

"What happened?" She asked. She couldn't hear screaming, so that was a good sign, right?

Hugo answered his mother only after extracting the spoon from his mouth. "Draco pulled Rose and Scorpius into the other room. He said he wanted to talk," he paused as if deep in thought. "Do I have to call him dad?" He asked.

Once again, Hermione was caught off-guard. "Only if you want to," she told him as she brushed his bangs from his eyes. "Even though I love him, we both know and respect that Ron is your father, and we aren't trying to take you away from him or make you chose between us. Draco wants to be part of your life, though, and will be there for you whenever you need him," that only partially sounded like it was taught from a book, Hermione decided with satisfaction. To her credit, she _had_ done some research on raising children in combined families. Just not as much as she should have, apparently.

"Okay." He sounded happy enough. Sometimes she wondered where his childlike innocence came from. The spoon went back in his mouth, and after another swallow of ice cream, he asked her another question. "Mum, what's an unspeakable orifice?"

* * *

Draco returned with the other children right after Hugo had finished his ice cream. She had already put the cake and oreos away and washed Hugo's empty ice cream bowl after clearing the dinner dishes. The pair had just been sitting in the kitchen, conversing more easily, when the other three decided to reappear. No one looked maimed or traumatized, which Hermione took as a good sign.

She scrutinized her husband, trying to decipher exactly what he was up to. It just wouldn't do, though, to question him in front of the children; they were supposed to appear as a unified parental front, not a mess of squabbling adults. He studiously ignored her glare.

"So, who wants a tour of the house?" He asked.

The children all looked mildly enthusiastic, which he took as a 'yes'.

They went through the rooms of the house methodically. Draco and Hermione had been living there since the wedding, but the children had been with their other parents for the holidays, and it had been a miracle enough that Draco and Hermione could have them at the wedding.

The house was smaller than Draco's old mansion, but larger than the cottage she had shared with Ron. It had taken months to finally find the house, after numerous fights and multiple accusations that the other was being too particular. They had decided on their new home almost before setting foot in it, just based on what the realtor said.

No room went to waste. Each child had their own room, with Hugo's closest to his parents', and there was a guestroom, a study for Draco, and the library Hermione had always dreamed of, as well as a field in the back large enough to accommodate quidditch. It was perfect for them, they had decided.

Watching the children appraise the house made them less sure. Hermione was overcome by a sudden fear that the stairs were much too steep and that someone would fall down them and break their neck. Draco was convinced that the children would abuse the hidden safe room, and that it was not secure enough for an emergency.

They showed the children their room and told them that they could decorate however they wanted.

"Subject to our approval," Draco added quickly, catching Scorpius' sly smile.

The tour complete, they'd all gone outside to play quidditch and read until the sun sank beneath the horizon, at which point Hermione had declared it time for baths and then bed.

Three hours later, though, she was still awake, and keeping her husband up with her tossing and turning.

"'Mione, I love you, but if you don't stop tossing and turning and kicking me in the kidney, I will shove a sleeping drought down your throat," he grumbled.

"Sorry," she whispered. She sighed and gave up on sleep. "I'm going to get a glass of water," she told him as she got out of bed.

But she didn't. Instead, she went to Hugo's room. He, for one, was sound asleep. She kissed his forehead and pulled the sheet up from his feet, tucking him in. He may be going into his second year of Hogwarts, but he would never be too old for his mother's love. Especially if he were unconscious and thus unable to protest.

Scorpius was next, as his room was right next to Hugo's and the boys shared the jack-and-jill bathroom. Except Scorpius was not in his room. Hermione tried not to panic. She knew there were plenty of logical explanations. He could have fallen asleep reading in the library. He could have gone flying. He could have been kidnapped by his insane mother.

She rushed across the hall to Rose's room, only to find that her daughter was also missing.

Oh dear lord.

Where would they have gone? She fought the urge to panic and quickly searched the rest of the room upstairs. They were all irritatingly silent. She told herself she was being ridiculous as she sprinted down the hall to the front staircase. She paused at her bedroom door, wondering if she should wake her husband, but then decided against it; she was only overreacting, and she would make _him _overreact with her, and then when he realized that they were both overreacting, she would never hear the end of it. So she left him snoring.

She searched the first floor, beginning with the library and even searching the coat closet for clues. It wasn't until she got to the kitchen that she let herself breathe; Rose and Scorpius were on the kitchen floor, eating oreos and cake.

"Oh thank god!" She exclaimed when she saw them.

"Mum!" Rose flinched. "What are you doing up?" She asked nervously.

"Me! What about you? And you? Do you know what time it is?"She screeched.

"About midnight, ma'am," Scorpius supplied politely.

_Ma'am_. "Scorpius, how much did your father pay you to be nice?"

The pale boy blanched to an ill shade of white. "How did you know?" He asked, his eyes wide.

"I know your father," she replied simply as she slid down the wall to sit beside them on the floor. "I'm guessing that he told the two of you to be nice when we were at the train station, and then after the pregnancy fiasco at dinner, he took you to the other room to scold and bribe you. Is that about right?" They nodded, looking scared. "Oh, don't worry, I'm not angry with either of you," she reassured them.

They visibly relaxed. "But really, how much?" She asked seriously.

Scorpius turned slightly pink. Hermione was amused; according to her dear husband, Malfoys did _not_ blush. "He promised he'd get us tickets to the quidditch finals," Scorpius admitted.

"How many?" She inquired.

"One for each of us," Rose told her mother sheepishly.

Hermione smiled devilishly. Screw the "united parental front"- getting through the summer and actually being family-like was more important that being effective disciplinarians. "I'll give you two each so you can bring another friend if you continue to bother your father."

"Mum!"

"I'll protect you from his wrath, of course," Hermione added hastily.

"Why?" Scorpius asked curiously.

"Because, dear, I thoroughly enjoy annoying your father. It keeps me young."

If her children had only been awkward to annoy her on purpose and they actually got along quite well, maybe there was hope for the weird little family after all. Especially if she managed to distract them with silly mind games they could all laugh about. After all, it was much better to have fake drama than real drama.

Yes, it would be a good summer.

"Mum, you're a little bit twisted," Rose said.

Hermione rolled her eyes, a gesture she'd acquired from her husband. "Shut up, dear, and eat your oreos."

* * *

By the way, don't assume that events are consistent throughout these pieces, because they aren't. For example, Ron might be flaming gay in one story, and a womanizing man-whore in the next. Just so you aren't baffled. But names are staying the same, and enough context should be given that everything makes sense. If not, just whack me in the head with a book. _Hogwarts: A History_, preferably.

I told myself I was going to bed an hour ago. You can see how well that went. But this will be the last update in a little while because I have convention and ACT this weekend!

I like reviews more than holiday oreos!


	4. The Loathsome Cockroach

Epilogue compliant! And loosely based on one of my own lovely conversations with my dad. And could be considered to be a follow-up of the last one. But only if you want to think of it that way. I don't.

* * *

**_The Loathsome Cockroach_**

It was the middle of the night when the popping in the fireplace, signaling the entrance of someone via floo, woke Draco up. He grabbed his wand, instantly on alert; no one visited him anymore, and certainly not in the middle of the night. He was not frightened (Malfoys were never frightened), but was instantly ready to fight. The war had ended decades ago, but the reflexes never changed.

"MALFOY!" Someone yelled. But it wasn't just anyone; due to the firewhiskey, it took him a moment to recognize it as the voice of his estranged step-daughter, Rose.

He would have almost preferred a rogue Death Eater.

"MALFOY!" She screamed again. He heard her stomping her way angrily up the stairs and grabbed his dressing gown before going to the door to meet her.

Even Slytherins could be idiotically brave at times.

Or maybe Hermione had just rubbed off too much on him. The thought made him nostalgic and depressed.

He lit the lights in the hallway with his wand and before his eyes had adjusted, he'd been punched. Even through the pain, he could appreciate the irony of the situation: he had taught her how to punch like that instead of the girly slap she'd done before. His lesson to only use violence in self-defense obviously hadn't sunk in as much, though.

"Merlin, Rose!" He exclaimed once he'd caught his breath.

Her only response was to sink her fist into his gut again.

She moved in for a third attempt, but he caught her wrist. She freed herself quickly and shoved him backwards, and the force of her anger caught him off guard.

"You're such an asshole!" She yelled. "I trusted you! _She_ trusted you! And all this time I've been urging her to talk to you again because I thought this was just another one of those dumb arguments you two have, and then tonight she finally told me to shut the fuck up because I had no idea what I was fucking talking about and she told me what really happened and I realized that you're a complete arsehole and I'm a complete idiot for ever wanting you two to ever make up!"

"Rose-"

"No, I'm talking now!" She shoved him again. "Gods, my mother! Do you know what you've done to her? She doesn't sleep, and she doesn't eat, and she's traumatized, but I don't know she would ever miss an asshole like you, and she's really better off without you because you could never be the man she deserved! And you never were! And I don't understand how she doesn't hate you, because I do! You're a foul, loathsome, evil little cockroach that should have been squished at birth because you don't deserve to live! And god, she _loved _you; didn't that mean _something? _She left my father for you; didn't _that_ mean something? She was ostracized by her friends and the people she had called family for years for _you_; didn't _that _mean something? And she's my mother and I love her and how you could you ever do something like that to her! To any of us!"

"Rose-"

"Shut the fuck up, Malfoy, because this is my turn!" She screamed and shoved him again, but her movements were getting sloppy. "For twelve years I loved you like you were my real father, and I called you 'dad' and so did Hugo and Scorpius called her mom and we were a big, weird happy family and then you betrayed her and you betrayed _us_ and damnit, did you ever think about a single one of us _once_? Inebriated as you were, did you ever once think "hey, I should probably get my hands off this whore because this is going to destroy everything"? Because you hurt every single one of us and god, what ever happened to being our father and doing the best for us? And I'd understand, maybe, if you didn't care about Hugo and me because we aren't your _real_ children, but Scorpius? He's the one person you're supposed to be programmed to feel _something_ for! God, your _own_ son despises you now, congratulations! "

"Rose!"

"NO!" She screamed, and even he could tell that she was losing control. "Do you get it, what you've done to us? How could you be so selfish? How could you hurt her like that? How could you hurt us like that?" Her chin dropped suddenly, violently, as if the will to fight him had deserted her all of a sudden. He gulped and missed her punches; they had been less painful than her words. Shuddering, she finally raised her head again. "Was it worth it?" She asked quietly, her eyes glittering with tears she was almost too proud to shed. Her voice was like death. Like a dementor's kiss.

He shook his head, and then his vocal chords found him again. "Hell no," he whispered. He wanted to tell her that nothing was worth it, nothing every would be, and that the slut hadn't been worth any piece of the aftermath: not watching his wife walk out on him, not being told by his son not to write, not watching Rose cry now, and certainly not the entire wreckage itself.

It had been one fight. One trip to the bar. One firewhiskey. One decently attractive witch to flirt with to avoid the pain. One more firewhiskey. One kiss. One firewhiskey to many. One trip upstairs. One rotten Weasley walking into the bar at precisely the wrong time and with every intention of further hurting his ex-wife. It was a series of singular and calamatous events in his head. It hadn't meant a single damn thing, and yet had destroyed everything that meant anything. He regretted it like hell.

But he didn't say that, because her rage had faded to sorrow, but the rage was resurfacing and she was battling her emotions just as she was battling him.

And then all at once she was upon him, thrashing and kicking and punching and slapping and sobbing and screaming "how could you!?!" as she fell apart. But he let her beat him, because he needed the pain, and she needed to inflict pain.

Holding his weeping daughter after she collapsed onto him hurt more than her violence had. He held her tightly, keeping her upright, even as she continued to feebly punch him and cry that she hated him.

He held her in the middle of the hallway until her tears had subsided and she was hugging him back. "Daddy, you have to fix this," she begged, still sniffling.

He kissed her head. "I'll try, princess," he promised. He didn't tell her that he didn't think he could, because, somehow, she still thought of him as superman, despite what he'd done, and if she thought he could pick up the pieces, he'd damn well try. She'd called him _daddy_.

He helped her into her childhood bed and tucked her in. He wished, not for the first time, that he could have married her mother sooner and been able to see her grow up. He wished he could have seen her take her first steps. He wished he could have vanquished the monsters from under her bed. He wished he could have taught Hugo how to ride a broom. He wished he could be more than a glorified step-father. That was the only aspect in which he was envious of Ron Weasley.

Rose curled up into the fetal position, just like she always had when she went to sleep. He quietly left the room, afraid of disturbing her deserved slumber. He wanted her to sleep through the pain and emotional exhaustion. She looked so childlike beneath the pink comforter, her face white under the pale light of the moon, that she looked 6 instead of nearly 26, and it made him ache to think he'd hurt her. It didn't matter that an adult; she was still his daughter, and perpetually a child to him.

He shut the door silently after one last look and went down the stairs to the living room. He took a bit of floo powder from the flower pot on the mantle and stepped into the flames.

He had a promise to fulfill.

* * *

Apparently, I lied about updating and stayed up late last night to write this, then revised with my spare time tonight. This is the last for a few days, though, scout's honor! And, just as a side note, I discovered today that that pesky burn on the inside of my elbow is second degree. Whooppeee :(

Also, I'm sorry to those of you who will be getting a crapload of meaningless story alerts. I'm revising. It makes me feel like an potter, perpetually tweaking the clay, and this is the closest I get to art.

I like reviews more than fidelity!


	5. Ice Cream

Epilogue compliant! Did you know that second-degree burns itch?

* * *

**_Ice Cream_**

There was a the screech of the heavy front door swinging on its hinges, then the crack of the door being slammed, and then the stamping of angry- very angry- feet across the foyer and down the hallway.

That was Draco Malfoy's first clue that his Saturday would not be as nice and peaceful as he had imagined.

The second was his fifteen year old step-daughter storming into the library with a look on her face that spelled murder very clearly and succinctly.

"Where's my mum?" She asked irately as she began to pace across the library like a wild but caged animal.

"She decided that Scorpius and Hugo needed clothes they could ruin playing quidditch in and actually fit. She said something about being Maria from the VanTrapp family," he paused, still confounded, and assumed it was a muggle reference. "Anyway, she's shopping for probably another hour." Suddenly he looked at his step-daughter suspiciously. "Aren't you supposed to be gone until late afternoon with your cousins?"

"YES!" She admitted with a strange mixture of guilt and viciousness. "But I lied about that; I spent the night at the Burrow and then left this morning because I've been meeting a boy, a stupid, moronic boy, and then I got to Diagon Alley and he met me for ice cream except then_ Pamela_ showed up and started screaming at me for being a whore because apparently she's been dating him too but he told her to keep it a secret because he wasn't supposed to date during Quidditch season and he told _me_ that he couldn't be caught dating a member of the opposing Quidditch team because then his team would give me extra hell for it and then I hexed her and punched him but she just kept screaming at me and I'm such a fool for believing him and for liking him and for lying to you and mum to be with him because he wasn't worth it and he's such an asshole but I really really liked him!"

Draco tried to blink and digest the information that had been hurled at him in rapid succession. He was still processing the first part of the sentence, though, when she fell to the floor and curled up into the fetal position, sobbing loudly. She was not a very graceful crier, he thought ruefully as he quickly made his way over to her.

She may have been fifteen, but she was petite, like her mother, and easy to pick up. He carried her to the couch as she sobbed violently, her body shaking with every tear. He may not have been her real father, but he still hated to see her cry. Especially over a teenage boy; he knew from firsthand experience what prats they were.

She leaned into him as they sat side by side on the couch, her knees pulled up to her chest. Usually, he would scold her for putting her shoes on the couch. This did not count as "usually" though. His arms were wrapped around her shoulders and he was rather uncomfortable, but he supposed he was supposed to be _comforting_, not necessarily _comfortable._

"Teenage boys are all assholes," he told her, and he silently thanked Merlin that Scorpius had not been a girl; he had no idea what to say in these situations. "Don't tell your mother I said that word," he added nervously. "But really, Rose, he doesn't deserve you, and um, you're a lovely young lady and if he can't see that, he's far too dumb for you. Really. You might as well cut off his balls now because nothing good could possibly come from his progeny. Oh Merlin, don't tell your mother I said that," he blundered on. She giggled, a tad, and the tears subsided, and then began afresh.

He continued to desperately seek out the right words and she continued to relapse into sobbing fits for another half hour before Hermione finally came home. He thanked Merlin she was always early and promised to never mock her for her punctuality ever again.

When she came across the awkward scene in the library, she had paused, momentarily perplexed, until her daughter had stood on shaking legs and stumbled across the room before falling into her arms. Hermione also led the girl to the couch, and Draco gave her the "don't look at me!" look before leaving.

Girls may have weirded him out a tad with their emotional displays, but he still had some things to take care of for them. He was very good at fighting other people's demons.

* * *

When Draco returned to the house hours later, he was laden with grocery bags stuffed with ice cream (which he had even thought to put a freeze charm on before leaving the cool air conditioning of the store), ice cream syrup of every variety, ice cream _toppings_ of every variety, oreos, popcorn, sappy teenage girl movies, and a jar of peanut butter.

"Draco?" Hermione said skeptically.

"Yes, love?"

"My parents were dentists."

"I know." And he handed her five brand new tubes of toothpaste. "I'm thinking that after they're all in food comas, it won't be too hard to convince that that mint toothpaste is just a new flavor of ice cream."

"It's still not healthy."

"Sure it is! See, strawberry ice cream's got the fruits covered, mint is good for you and stimulates the brain or something, nuts are good for the immune system I think, chocolate is good for the heart, and well, ice cream is a dairy product. So that's two and a half food groups covered! I think."

She just looked at him. "That was not a very convincing argument," she told him flatly.

He kissed the back of her obstinate head and continued to unload the groceries without her help. "It's one night, love. You can go back to force-feeding them broccoli and spinach tomorrow, but you know that Rose needs this. Anyway, it'll be fun."

She looked at him, and he could tell that she had her reservations- and rightly so, because he was basically attempting to give them all Type 2 Diabetes- but she was tempted. She was very tempted. She'd definitely relaxed over the years, though he had never been of the mind that she had a pool cue shoved up her ass, as some people apparently thought.

"This only happens once," she finally stated reluctantly. "This is not going to be a pattern. Just this once. Just because the children are still adjusting to being a blended family and this can be a fun bonding experience. And just because this is Rose's first real heartbreak. But she's still supposed to be punished for lying to us and sneaking around."

"Never again," he promised solemnly, fighting the urge to smile. The look on her face told him everything: she secretly wanted to eat ice cream until her teeth rotted and fell out, but, of course, couldn't say so. Her parents were dentists.

They set up a buffet of ice cream and junk food on the kitchen counter before Hermione noticed the movies and eyed her husband questioningly.

"What?" He asked defensively. "The lady at the video store said that any teenage girl going through a breakup would love to watch these!"

She was momentarily struck by how genuinely sweet he was. It was rather out of character and disconcerting. "Who are you, and what have you done with my husband?" She asked, only half-teasing.

He gave her a patented Malfoy glare, though, thus reassuring her that she had indeed married who she thought she had. "I'm not being nice," he informed her. "I'm being devious. I'm making sure that Rose and Hugo like me better than Ron, and that Scorpius likes me more than Astoria. I'm really just feeding my own ego, love."

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, of course. Because it's not like you really care about being a good, concerned, doting father."

He smiled. "No, definitely not."

She kissed him suddenly. It was moments like that, amid the banter and sarcasm but obvious affection, that made her feel alive with her husband. She'd been physically alive with Ron, but her soul had been listless; there'd been no passion, no fire. She loved the reminders the Draco was not Ron, and that he challenged and surprised her and loved her completely.

He pulled back first, much to her chagrin. "Later," he said, eyes gleaming with desire. "After the children have crashed from their sugar highs."

But she kissed him again anyway, very quickly, before calling the children down for dinner… Well, dessert.

Hugo was the first down the stairs. He looked at the buffet, and then at his mother. He was clearly delighted, but baffled. "Mum, this is ice cream," he stated unsurely.

"Yes dear," she replied. "Don't let your father know I'm letting you eat ice cream for dinner, though," she added as an afterthought.

Hugo beamed and began to scoop ice cream into his bowl. "Don't worry, mum, when dad lets us eat ice cream for dinner, it's straight out of the cartoon; this is so much better!"

Hermione became slightly furious and hypocritical with her ex-husband.

Rose and Scorpius were next. Scorpius had his arm awkwardly around her shoulders; she'd stopped crying hours ago, but he was trying to be comforting, as she was still rather depressed. The two were tenuous friends, bridging the Great Slytherin-Gryffindor Divide, due to the unfortunate fact that they had become step-siblings very much against their wills. They had gone so far as to attempt to stop the wedding with crazy plots; luckily, they had gotten past that stage.

Or at least, so their parents hoped.

The family watched movies, periodically throwing popcorn at the asinine films on the screen of the muggle tv Hermione had insisted they buy, and ate their ice cream. They watched three movies before Hermione felt herself begin to drift off, and then Draco decided it was time for everyone to go to bed. Which was all right and jolly, considering he was the only one still awake.

He shook his wife awake, who gave him the best death glare she could muster while half-asleep, and then helped him wake up the children, except for Hugo, because Hugo became a log when he slept, an inanimate object unable to wake. Draco carried him upstairs as Hermione attempted to coax Rose and Scorpius up the stairs, only partially successful as they staggered along, each leaning heavily on her shoulders while muttering about five more minutes.

By the time all three children had collapsed into bed, Hermione and Draco felt like finding a nice piece of floor to curl up and sleep on for the next few days. Instead, they dragged themselves back downstairs to clean up the mess.

They were almost done when a thought suddenly struck Hermione. "Hey, where were you all afternoon?" She asked curiously as she magicked the last syrup remnants from the counter.

"Getting all this stuff," he gesticulated vaguely.

"For six hours?" asked incredulously.

"I had to go to a couple of stores," he explained.

Her eyes narrowed; they both knew he wasn't telling the whole truth. "Draco, it wouldn't have taken that long to get all this stuff if the ice cream had still been in a Swiss cow this morning."

He didn't answer, just smirked slyly and disappeared up the stairs.

* * *

Life at the Granger-Malfoy-Weasley house was fairly normal after that Saturday night: Draco continued to go to work, Hermione continued to research Merlin-knew-what for St. Mungo's, and the children continued to pester the hell out of their parents, though Rose did so with just a tad less enthusiasm than before.

That Tuesday, Rose and Draco were reading in the library when the doorbell rang, which was strange, given that most of their guests either flooed or apparated in. As in, no one ever came to the front door. Ever.

"Rose, door," Draco said flatly, not bothering to look up from his paper.

"You're closer," she retorted, not moving from her seat across the room.

"Rose, door," he persisted, glancing up to glare at her.

She glared back and stood, throwing her mystery novel to the ground. "Fine!"

She left in a tizzy, her petite feet slapping angrily against the wood floor of the library before she threw the door open. Hermione came into the library just as Rose was stomping out of it.

"What's going on?" She asked, looking from her placid husband to her fuming daughter.

"Your husband is an insufferable git who can't be bothered to answer the door!" Rose shouted angrily as she stalked passed.

Draco smirked and Hermione gave him a questioningly look as Rose noisily made her way into the foyer. "Paper?" He offered with fake nonchalance.

"What-"

"Sh!" He scolded quickly as the hinges of the front door creaked.

Hermione was confused but listened anyway.

"Brian!" She heard Rose exclaim, surprised but not in a good way. From her vantage point in the doorway, Hermione looked from her daughter and her secret ex-boyfriend to her husband before deciding to disappear into the library.

"Um, hi, Rose," Brian said nervously as Hermione and Draco both shamelessly eavesdropped. "I just wanted to say, well, I'm sorry that I lied to you. And that Pamela called you a whore, because you aren't one, you _definitely_ aren't one. And I'm sorry that I used you, and that I hurt you, and that I sort of cheated on you, and that I made you lie, and that I was an asshole. You deserve better."

Hermione was stunned and couldn't even imagine what he daughter was feeling. She watched absently as her husband continued to casually read the paper, but she knew that he was listening very intently.

"Did you have anything to do with this? She hissed.

He didn't bother to look up. "I have no idea what you're talking about," he told her dryly. But she caught a glimpse of a hidden smirk and was about to ask him when Rose and Brian began to talk again.

She listened as Rose said, "I still think you're a smarmy bastard, but I'll forgive you." There was a pause, and then she asked, "Brian, what happened to your eye?"

* * *

I think we all know what happened there. Anyway, after two discarded one-shots and a day spent in bed, apparently pretending to be sicker than I was, this is what surfaced. I like reviews more than never having had my heart broken!


	6. Wedding Cake

Not DH compatible. Basically at all. Dedicated to Kaleesha on the happy occasion of her first kiss!!! (I'm still eeeeeeekkk!-ing and smiling like an idiot, so I can't imagine what you're doing!)

* * *

_**Wedding Cake**_

"Draco?" Hermione called into his flat after letting herself in.

She dropped her purse by the front door and slid out of her shoes. Her feet ached from shopping in Diagon Alley with Narcissa, her head pounded painfully from listening to the insufferable woman, and her fingers were numb from the cold; she was not a very happy camper.

"In the study," he called, and she followed the sound of his voice, discarding clothing as she went. Her gloves went first, followed by her scarf, then hat, and she had just begun to unbutton her coat when she stumbled into the study.

"You look like someone tried to drown you," he noted as she fell onto him, shoving his office work to the floor. His fingers nimbly pulled her wet coat off for her and let it fall to the ground with her other discarded clothing as she limply straddled his lap.

"Close," she mumbled into his neck. "Your mother tried to strangle me with tulle."

He laughed, his chest shaking her as he pushed the hair out of her eyes. "Now, now, love, I'm sure it wasn't that bad," he said patronizingly.

She glared. "It's true! One minute I was trying on a dress with her, because _you_ wanted me to make her happy, and the next the tulle had somehow wound itself around my neck and the sales woman was all in a tizzy and trying to wrangle it back into submission! It was horrible!"

He kissed her forehead. Later, when she wasn't so exhausted, he decided he'd tease her mercilessly about being attacked by fabric. "Well, my mother was charming inanimate objects into torturing you, I was finalizing the guest list with your parents."

She cringed. "What's the final count?"

"After I talked your mother out of inviting your best friend from when you were two- by the way, I still don't know how you managed to be friends with someone who only spoke German while you only spoke English- the guest list was down to a mere 823. And I supposed I should be glad you dated Ron and it ended horribly, because that's a whole family of what, 50?, that was very cleanly crossed off the guest. And I'm so glad I screwed all those girls back at Hogwarts, because that's nearly half of Slytherin that we don't have to invite."

But she hated when she talked about their past relationships, and he felt her muscles tense. "Of course, I didn't date _every_ girl in Slytherin," he amended arrogantly. "But between family ties and loyalties and such, there are quite a few people we won't have to deal with."

"823."

"Yes." Even though the figure filled him with dread as well, he found it slightly amusing in the abstract.

She sighed. "And we still have to deal with all the arguments about the cake, and the location, and where we go on the honeymoon, and what we name the children."

"Children?" He choked.

She rolled her eyes, but he didn't see, given that her head was on his shoulder as she nuzzled his neck. "Don't worry, you haven't knocked me up, "Sex God of Slytherin". I meant future children."

He breathed a sigh of relief before an idea came to him. "What if we told people I had, so then we could have a fast shotgun wedding and get my mother and everyone else to lay off this huge, elaborate wedding they're planning?"

For the first time that day, she laughed. "I don't think that would work, love, when there's no baby."

"Devil in the details," he declared. "Oh, and your mother added another two bridesmaids," he recalled suddenly.

Her brief moment of happiness fizzled and died abruptly. "That brings it up to 12. Do I even _know_ this person?" She asked, referencing Draco's first cousin once removed Atria, who had been added to the bridesmaid's list by Narcissa.

"I don't know, but the way your mother was carrying on, I got the impression that she'd known one of the girls since birth and you were best friends growing up. That probably means that she met the girl two days ago in the supermarket and they bonded over toothpaste brands."

"Stop trying to make me laugh," she retorted bitterly. "You can't just deliver frustrating news with a joke attached and expect it to be alright!"

"Okay," he murmured, wondering if she was on her period; that bit _always_ worked. He decided to blame her pre-wedding frustration.

She extricated herself from his grip but stayed on his lap so she could look him in the eye. "This has gotten completely out of hand," she told him seriously. "I just wanted a small wedding, immediate family and close friends, and you said you didn't care as long as the cake was good. And then your mother got involved, and my mother couldn't be outdone, and now we've got over 800 people and too many bridesmaids to count and I don't really give a damn about the flowers they put on the table as long as I get to pick my bouquet, nor do I care if the tent is enchanted to sparkle, or if they release doves when we kiss, or if veela dance at the reception. We need to reclaim this wedding."

He nodded in agreement. "You can be the one to tell my mother."

She swatted his arm. "Thanks, love. You might as well just offer me pistol; I'm sure it'd be less messy to blow my brains out than let Narcissa rip me to shreds. Now, seriously, how are we going to do damage control on this?"

"I have no idea. You're the brains of this relationship, darling."

She groaned and collapsed back onto his chest. He wrapped his arms around her tightly and she burrowed into his neck. "I don't want to dread our wedding," she admitted quietly. "I don't want to walk down the aisle and feel overwhelmed by a crowd of people I don't know. I want to kiss you when the minister says to, and I don't want to be worried about my lipstick smudging."

"I like that part," he whispered, nibbling her ear playfully. "What _do_ you want?" he asked more seriously.

She paused in thought for a moment. "I want a white dress with a satin sash and a swishy skirt. And I want our immediate family and good friends there. And I want really good cake that I can smear on your lips and then kiss off. And I want a good photographer so that when we're old and I nag you until you hex me in my sleep, we can show our kids how happy we were. But mostly, I just want you."

He kissed the side of head and pulled her closer. "Let's elope," he said suddenly.

"We can't," she said automatically.

"Why not?" He urged. "With my connections and your abilities to organize and conquer, we could get exactly the wedding you want tomorrow. In the morning you could coax one of those Creepy blokes into taking pictures and I could persuade the people at that church on Ashbury you like so much into letting us have our wedding there. Then in the afternoon, you could go find your dress and I, the connoisseur of cake and all things edible, could go to the bakery. Then if they don't have to roll me out the door, we could meet here, get ready, and then kidnap our friends and family."

She didn't say anything, but he knew her, and her exasperation with the Wedding of Doom, enough to know that she might actually throw all her meticulous planning to the wind and be spontaneous for once. She collapsed into him once more, and he gave her time to think; he'd had to learn how to be patient for her.

"They're going to hate us," she told him.

"We'll just hex them into loving the idea," he retorted dismissively. "Wait, does that mean…"

She grinned into his neck. "A little slow on the uptake," she teased. "Now I know why I was first in our class, and you were what, fourteenth?"

He pinched the skin on the side of her arm playfully. "Yeah, yeah. Now get up so I can owl Calvin. I've changed my mind; we'll start getting ready tonight."

"Colin," she corrected.

"Yeah, both of them, whatever."

She rolled her eyes and reluctantly stood up, her legs groaning in protest. Several ill-fated attempts to run away from her future monster-in-law had made her thighs burn. She let him get up before collapsing into his chair. She watched absently as he carelessly scribbled the note on a spare bit of parchment. The way his eyes glowed made her stomach squirm with a strange sort of happiness. Her eyes flickered between her engagement ring and his face.

Married. They were getting married.

She watched him summon his owl and send the letter before he pulled her damp coat from the ground. He magicked it dry and then forced her back into it.

"I change my mind about your dress too- you're not shopping tomorrow. I'll come to Diagon Alley with you now and help you find something. We've got about another hour and a half before the shops close; more, if we bribe people."

"What about food?" She asked, ever the practical one, especially when hunger gnawed at her stomach.

He pulled her into the hall and crammed her hat back onto her head. "Aren't all brides supposed to go anorexic before the wedding so they can fit into their dresses? So just pretend that you're normal for once."

She frowned at him. "I've been shopping with your mother all day," she persisted. "I'm sick of it; I don't even like shopping to begin with!"

"That's really too bad," he said unapologetically. He knew for a fact that she enjoyed shopping with him far more than shopping with his mother. He was almost tolerable to go shopping with. "You see, I suffer from reverse materialism: I derive immense happiness from other people finding happiness in material goods. It began as a child, when Mother would take me shopping and if she was happy with her purchases, I was happy, because I got cake. So you're going to find your flippy skirt and you're going to like it."

"The adjective was "swishy", dear," she corrected as they reached the foyer. "And I'm not giving you cake if I'm happy." He smiled and coaxed her gloves back on her hands. In return, she pulled his things from the hall closet and dressed him in his outer clothes as well. She even tied the striped scarf around his neck because she knew he hated the stupid gift from her mother and she wanted to annoy him. He caught on to the fact but paid no mind. She may have been peeved, but she was going to marry him anyway. That, he mused, was real love.

When they were both bundled up for the cold, they apparated together to Diagon Alley from just outside his flat. Wordlessly, he led her to a small food shop, the wizarding equivalent of a fast food joint. He didn't bother to ask her what she wanted; he already knew. That sort of terrified both of them, so they implicitly decided not to say anything about how freakishly well he knew her as they walked down the street. It was especially strange when considering it had taken him the better part of two minutes to decide what he wanted.

"The wedding shop is this way," she said, tugging him to the left and the intersection.

He merely cocked an eyebrow. She'd learned, though, that it was not an aristocratic gesture of nonchalance. Well, it was, sometimes, but usually, like now, it was something he did before he did something that would throw her for a loop, but it a good way. That one little gesture helped set up comic relief in their relationship, and she found that when he did it, her stomach turned flips in anticipation. She had also decided that he absolutely could not ever love anyone else, but no one else could possibly study and decipher him as meticulously as she could; with anyone else, the gesture would have been taken at face value, and he would live his life as an actor.

"So it is," he noted dryly. But the twitch of his fingers belied the fact that he was just itching with excitement, and that made her a bit bubbly on the inside too.

He led her to a normal dress shop and pushed her inside. He called to the proprietor, a woman named Lola, and gave her a look that bespoke his devious ways. She almost laughed, because he was like a roasted marshmallow; hard and rough on the exterior, but warm and gooey on the inside. He may have pretended to still be the devilish Slytherin he had once been, but she knew the truth: he was undeniably a closet romantic. He was, after all, helping her pick out her wedding dress, and how many men did _that?_ Because she knew that reverse materialism was really only one of his many facades. No, Draco wanted to be with her, but he had his pride and self-consciousness and could never say so. But she knew; she knew _him_.

She explained to Lola what kind of dress she wanted without mentioning the wedding. Lola had seen the papers, though, and knew of the engagement. Her frail, wrinkled eyes peered at the ring on Hermione's finger and gushed in the way that every old lady before her had. Hermione wondered if Lola was remembering her own engagement, and if she would be doing the same thing when she grew old.

Lola led her through the nearly-empty store to a section of white dresses. "I've known Mister Malfoy for quite some time now," Lola told her. "He was just a tiny little tyke when he first toddled into my store with Missus Malfoy. He used hide between the aisles, hidden in the fabric of the dresses, eating pretzels and sometimes ice cream. The cutest thing, really, although a bit messy. He's grown up into such a handsome man. I don't think he would quite fit between the aisles anymore, do you?" She joked. "Now, I think that these three are what you're looking for, more or less."

The first white dress was strapless, and automatically out; Hermione didn't quite trust strapless bras, and despised corsets. The next fit her specifications perfectly, and was everything she wanted, and some things she hadn't even realized she wanted.

It was modest, which she liked, but was flirty, which she knew he would like. It was sleeveless, with a v-neck that didn't venture too far for her liking. The skirt reached to just passed her knees and was made with enough excess material that she knew it would swirl around her thighs when she spun. The sash, one of her soft-spots, was golden and was softer than butter to the touch.

She didn't both looking at the third dress. She'd found her wedding dress. Damn the cold, she would wear it.

She found Draco waiting by the changing room and he quickly shoved her in. It took her a while to undo all the zippers and snaps of her jacket, sweater, t-shirt and jeans, and he threatened to help her undress more than once.

After wrestling out of her clothes, slipping on the dress was easy and only cemented her belief that she had found The One. Well, in terms of dresses, anyway; she'd already known that she'd found The One romantically.

"Are you planning on showing me, or are you going to just stand in there admiring your reflection?" he called. He was excited and impatient, she knew. She was too.

She meant to tease him about not seeing the bride in the wedding dress before the wedding, but remembered Lola's prying ears and the secrecy of the whole thing. So instead she reminded him that she was not preening in front of the mirror, because she was, in fact, not him.

She walked out a moment later nervously. She loved the dress, and that should have been all that mattered, but he had to like it too. She felt pathetic for basing her opinions on his opinions, but she couldn't quite convince herself to care about being pathetic.

His eyes widened when he saw her. "You look divine," he told her, and she knew he meant it. She felt light and giddy and did a little twirl for him. The dress swirled about her thighs accordingly. She felt beautiful, even without makeup or groomed hair.

"No snarky comments? She prompted.

"No snarky comments," he murmured and pulled her forward. He kissed her until Lola returned and made them separate by virtue of being present. They didn't like having an audience. If she waited a few more minutes, though, they would have been too far gone to care.

They told Lola they'd take the dress, and he went to pay as she was left with the dubious task of redressing herself for the cold. She met them at the register, an ancient device that almost resembled a muggle cash register but with an assortment of odd buttons and knobs.

"So, I assume I shouldn't tell Missus Malfoy that you've picked out your wedding dress without her, then?" Lola asked.

Hermione and Draco just stared at her. How had she known? But she even seemed to read these thoughts, for she simply said, "Oh, I know everything."

When they left the store, hand in hand, it was a good deal darker than it had been before, and colder as well. Draco pulled Hermione close as they walked to the jewelry shop to pick up their rings early. They made it just before the shop closed, and then went back to his flat.

"This is our last night sleeping alone," she told him suddenly. It was 11, and she was exhausted from shopping, but she was almost afraid to leave, afraid that she would wake up find that eloping had been just a dream, and, almost worse, the wedding from hell was still on.

"Yeah," he whispered, and pulled her close. She was already his, he knew. Married or not, she was her own person who chose to give herself to him completely. But after tomorrow, it was final, it was definite; no more fighting and sulking in their separate flats. No more waiting for commitment. No more fending off questions from nagging, intrusive parents about being proper. No, just the two of them, together.

* * *

When he showed up at her flat early the next morning, she was already up and nursing her third cup of tea. She handed him one as well, wordlessly. She'd been expecting him. It was made exactly the way he liked it, and was still hot.

"So now what?" She prompted. "We've already got the dress and the photographer and the rings, which sort of screws up your original plan."

"Now we go along with whatever you've planned," he told her as he sipped his tea.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said primly. But she did. They both did. She was just offering him the opportunity to continue to take control before she got very, very bossy.

"We both know that you basically stayed up all night planning today out. So what's on the agenda?" He smiled, because he knew she was about to go into bossy-mode, and he was giving her permission. It simultaneously turned him on and terrified him.

She took a breath and then launched into her plan. "Okay, well, your original plan was fine, but a little loose, and we've already completed some of the most important tasks. So now we're going to book our dinner reservations for a mini-reception and the book the hotel room, which means we have to decide where we're going to honeymoon, and if we even want to honeymoon right now, because if we wait a bit we could probably take a longer vacation. So once that's decided and done, we need to make sure that all of our guests are available, so we'll owl them all and make decoy plans. Even if they already have plans, they may tell us where they're going which will make it easier to kidnap them. We also need to find someone to officiate the ceremony. I was thinking Harry, which means we should tell him early. And then we'll go to the bakery to order the cake, and we'll have to make do with an already-made one, with this short notice. Then we'll get ready and try to announce our plans to everyone all at once—the band-aid method, you know? Then we'll "hex them into submission" and have the ceremony."

He blinked and smiled; only she would be spontaneous and yet still have a plan. In that moment, it was not annoying, but endearing.

The day was then spent in a whirlwind of activity as they carefully executed every step of her plan. The last steps were where it got messy, though. Hermione's parents were "meeting" them for dinner down the road. Hermione called them from her cell phone—a device Draco had yet to understand—to ask them to meet her at the church. She told them she wanted them to see about the location for the wedding. She didn't mention that what they thought about the location didn't mean a single damn thing.

Harry had brought Ginny to the church on the pretense of visiting the place his parents had been married on their anniversary. Ginny, luckily, still regarded Hermione as a friend whereas the rest of the family had seemed to write her off after her break-up with Ron. She had been closest to Hermione, after all; it hadn't been as easy for her to write off a dear friend, especially when she knew what an oaf Ron had been.

Harry left Ginny at the altar a moment so he could use the loo. Or at least, that's what he said. He went to the loo, but then apparated to the Zabini's and kidnapped Blaise, just as Draco was busy kidnapping his parents, and Hermione was leading hers into the church.

The three sets of conspirators appeared in the church at almost the same time, just as Hermione had choreographed. She hadn't planned on Harry's broken nose, but she fixed that quickly enough as the guests got the stammering out of their systems.

"Right, all done with the mindless babbling?" Draco prompted. They were silent and he pulled Hermione close as they faced their small and confused gathering of friends and family.

"So, we've brought you all here today to tell you that for the most part, you've made our lives a living hell," Hermione told them. It had been decided that she'd do the explanation, as she was less likely to curse. "This is our wedding. Ours. You may not relive your glory days through us vicariously. So, rather than explain this to you and then continue to plan a wedding that will indubitably end up as a monstrosity anyway due to your input, we've decided to get married without your help.

"We thought about eloping the normal way, but then realized that we did want you here for this. So you can either stay for our small ceremony or go pout. But you can't stop us."

Narcissa looked the most outraged; Mrs. Granger, the most offended. The others looked surprised, but understanding. Blaise just looked amused.

"So…" Draco prompted nervously. He'd really rather not have to hex anyone into submission. Well, at least not any of these people; he'd have no qualms about hexing others into submission, particularly a certain Viktor Krum who had emerged just when Hermione and Ron broke up, expecting to get back into the picture.

"I suppose apologies and congratulations are in order," Lucius remarked wryly. "So, when does the ceremony begin?"

"Now!" Hermione announced delightedly. "Everyone, take your seats. I'll go fetch Colin from his hiding spot and then Harry will officiate!"

"No!" Narcissa shot back. "This is _not_ a proper Malfoy wedding! This is only a short step above a hitching booth at a county fair! I don't bloody care that you don't want hundreds of people at your wedding, that's how it's going to happen! That's how it always happens!"

There was the resistance they had been waiting for.

"Not anymore," her son said shortly. "We're getting married, right now, and then we're all going to Callaman's for dinner where we'll dance and eat wedding cake. If you don't like it Mother, you can leave."

"It's because you're pregnant, aren't you?" Narcissa screamed. "You slut! This has been your plan the whole time, hasn't it! Date him, sleep with him, get pregnant, get married and get tied to the Malfoy fortune! I demand a paternity test! You whore!"

No one bothered to mention to Narcissa that Draco and Hermione had been dating for three years and engaged for months already. She wasn't exactly inclined to see reason at the moment.

Before Draco or Hermione could tell her to shut up, though, Hermione's mother had slapped the woman. The resounding smack had stunned everyone, not just its victim. "My daughter is not a whore!" She screamed. The room was silent for a moment, the tension palpable. "And you're a bitch!" She added as an afterthought.

The two women bickered until Hermione froze them both with a quick flick of her wrist. "Right, so Hermione isn't pregnant, isn't after my money, and most certainly is not promiscuous in any way, and if anyone else has objections, they can kindly remove themselves or be hexed," Draco said seriously.

The others sat down in the first few pews of the small church while Draco and Hermione dragged their respective mothers into separate rooms.

"Mum, I love him, and he makes me happy, and I know this wedding isn't what you pictured for me, but it's everything I ever wanted, but if you can't support me in this, or if you think I've failed you, then I'm sorry," Hermione told her mother.

Mrs. Granger embraced her daughter tightly. "If this is what you want, then okay. Really, ducky, it's just that terrible Narcissa woman I can't stand. But you've never failed me, and you never will. I'm so glad you've included me in your wedding after everything, and I love you."

Draco's pitch to his mother was more succinct:

"Screw this up for me and I'll never forgive you."

Narcissa had agreed.

The rest of the ceremony went off without a hitch, save for the obnoxious flashing light of the camera. The wedding party, including an only semi-irate Narcissa Malfoy, adjourned to the restaurant to celebrate.

It was done. They were married, officially and legally now instead of only in spirit. They'd never sleep alone again. They'd never have to deal with insane wedding plans again.

They'd never be afraid of tulle again.

They were relieved at what the wedding meant, but moreover, elated to be married at all. Who would have thought they, of all people, would end up married? If someone had told Hermione's twelve year old self about her future, she would have very nicely taken them by the hand and led them to the nearest Wacky Shack. Now, though, her twenty-four year old self could think of nothing better. She was married.

And so Hermione Granger got to smear wedding cake on Draco Malfoy's face and then kiss it off. And it was really, really good cake too.

* * *

This was not supposed to be this long, nor this fluffy. ACT results in 4.75 hours! Eek!

Reviews are better than cake. Reviews are better than having a fixation with food motifs. I really think I need to break this habit. I really don't think I will, though.


	7. The Truth, the Lies, the Secrets

Epilogue compatible!

**_The Truths, the Lies, and the Secrets_**

She was beautiful. He didn't even feel bad about staring, because he was divorced and free to be just as weird and creepy as he wanted. So he did. He watched her dancing with _him_, watched her laughing with her friends, watched her as she escaped the throngs of people and make her way out of the ballroom.

She was beautiful, he decided, but wildly unhappy.

She hadn't noticed him watching her; in fact, no one had. He was good at being inconspicuous. So, very inconspicuously, he followed her into the hallway.

He made it just in time to see the white silk of her dress disappear around a corner. His footsteps were silent on the plush carpeting, and he used it to his advantage as he all but ran after her. He was hoping to catch her to talk, for a verbal sparring match. He loved to see her angry. Whoever thought she was a bland prude had obviously never seen her even a little bit annoyed; she was passionate, he knew, and had a fire in her spirit Weasley would never understand. Which, he mused, was probably why she was so wildly unhappy.

He rounded the corner after her, his fingers tingling with the prospect of talking to her. She was his favorite itch to scratch, and he saw her so rarely that he took every opportunity he could to talk to her. He'd been doing so for years. Watching her was not enough.

He looked down the dim hallway, searching for a hint of that white skirt. He didn't see her; she must have stepped into one of the rooms too quickly.

"Hello, Draco," she said quietly.

Startled, he turned to see her nearly hidden in an alcove to his right. Her elbows rested on her knees as she held her head in her hands. She didn't just look wildly unhappy, she looked like hell.

"Hermione," he said awkwardly. He wasn't used to worrying about her health; she was supposed to be invincible. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," she snapped, her voice shaking.

She was lying. "No, you're not." He kneeled before her and looked up at her. Up close, she looked deathly pale. In her white dress, she looked like a ghost. He touched her arm and was shocked by the coolness of her skin. "What happened?"

She wasn't breathing, but gasping for air. "Nothing! Go away!" But even as she tried to scream at him, she was clutching her stomach and groaning in pain. Then he noticed the blood.

"Hermione!" He didn't think, just acted, and picked her up and cradled her against him. She was light and frail in his arms, and the silk made it hard for him to hold her, but he didn't want to squeeze her too tightly.

He apparated them to St. Mungo's illegally, but he didn't care that he wasn't at a sanctioned apparition point. He carried her to the emergency check-in despite her half-hearted attempts to escape from him.

"What happened?" The healer asked him.

"I don't know, I don't know," he muttered desperately.

"Healer Gregory," she murmured, her eyes barely open. "I need Healer Gregory."

The healer went running for Healer Gregory and left Draco standing there, still holding her. He could feel the blood on the back of her dress, making the dress more slippery than it already was.

"Hermione," he whispered. He wanted to push her bangs from her eyes, but his arms were occupied and he didn't want to put her down. He stood in the middle of the empty reception room listening to his heart pounding in his chest and her blood drip onto the floor. It was hell.

He felt the seconds pass slowly, and then, finally, heard the footsteps of the doctor approaching. Her limp body was pulled from his arm and put on the gurney, but he clung to her hand. It wasn't natural for him to be this attached to someone, but he didn't care.

"Family only," the nurse said, shoving him aside rudely.

"I'm her husband!" He insisted, blatantly lying. It was a desperate, stupid lie, but the nurse was either tired or gullible enough to believe it.

He walked beside her gurney until they reached the door marked "Personnel only". He stood outside long after she had disappeared, slightly traumatized and confused. He knew he needed to get her real husband, or Harry, or someone, but he couldn't leave her alone. When the Healer's didn't even recognize the infamous Hermione Granger, something was wrong. Very wrong.

He stood in the cold hallway for an hour until the nurse ushered him back into the waiting room and handed him forms to fill out. He left them blank. He didn't know anything about her. He finally owled Harry. He didn't want to think about Weasley. He'd heard the rumors about her errant husband and, while he'd made his peace with Harry, he still though the redheaded sidekick was a bit of a git.

A new nurse came to take him back to see her. She gave him a mean look for not filling out any of the papers, but led him back to her room nonetheless.

The healer was waiting for him. "How is she?" Draco asked. He'd never been scared for anyone's safety before, save his son's.

"She's doing better than expected. She won't bounce right back, but she should make a quick recovery. You can take her home tomorrow, maybe, or the next day."

"What happened?" He asked. His mouth was dry. She was Hermione Granger. She didn't get stuck in St. Mungo's for days. She was too stubborn to be weak.

"I'm sorry, sir, but there was nothing we could do to save your son," the healer told him gently. For a moment, he was stunned and confused, thinking of Scorpius and wondering what the hell had happened. And then, he realized everything all at once. Hermione had been pregnant. Hermione had lost her baby. The healer expected him to tell her.

"Oh God," Draco whispered. He pushed his way into the room with her. She looked too tiny and frail to be alive, and he worried, for a moment, that he had lost her too, and then he saw her eyes following him as he walked from the door to the center of the room.

"Hey," he whispered. "Uh… how do you feel?"

She looked at him blankly, and moved her hand over her stomach. "It happened, didn't it?" She asked. He couldn't answer her. How did you tell a woman her baby was dead? "It's okay," she whispered. "I can tell. You don't have to say it."

"I'm sorry," he whispered. The room was dark, illuminated only with the pale glow of the moon, but he could see her eyes glistened with tears. She fought them for a moment, and then gave up and sobbed.

He crossed the room to her bedside. He wasn't good at comforting people, but he tried for her. He sat on the edge of her bed and pushed her hair from her eyes with one hand, and held her hand with the other.

"It'll be okay," he whispered.

She leaned forward and didn't seem to care that it was Draco Malfoy who was comforting her. "I'm such a slut," she sobbed quietly, almost talking to herself. "I shouldn't have done all those things. This is all my fault. I'm so stupid. Oh God, I'm so stupid."

He was slightly shocked. "What do you mean? Did you…" Surely, Hermione didn't mean that she had been sleeping around? If word from the grapevine was to be believed, he'd say she had every right, but she was _Hermione Granger!_

"God, no!" She nearly shouted. He winced at her proximity to his ear as she continued. "I just meant… God, this is embarrassing. You've… you've heard things about Ron, haven't you?" She paused and he nodded, certain they were on the same page. She didn't want to clarify, and he didn't want to make her clarify. "Well, it's true. Not the more outrageous rumors, of course, but the rest are all pretty much right on the mark. And stupid, stupid me, I thought it was all about sex, so I… well, I got more… daring sexually … but it was never enough and it didn't work because he kept… well, you know what he did… and then I was pregnant but couldn't tell him and now this and oh God, oh God…" and then she broke down into another round of sobs and he wrapped his arms around her. She couldn't be feeling alright if she just admitted that to him. She couldn't be feeling alright if she'd done all that in the first place.

"He's an idiot," he told her. "You're beautiful, and he's an idiot for not seeing it, and for thinking he'd do better than you. You're so much better than he is. He wouldn't even be alive without you, now, would he? And you're not a slut- not by a long shot, so don't you dare even begin to think so. You're beautiful."

She shook her head, dismissing the compliment. She didn't realize that he didn't just hand out compliments, and he didn't give out pity-compliments. She didn't realize that he meant it. "Why are you even here?" She asked, no longer as vulnerable and quickly realizing how odd her situation was.

"A Malfoy always helps a damsel in distress," he said gallantly. They both recognized the lie; most Malfoys had no such morals. He, though, was the beginning of a new generations; maybe he'd be different. "Plus, I was the one who found you. You looked like you needed urgent care and I didn't think Weasley would be of much help."

She looked into his eyes. She was exhausted and aching, but she found comfort in his eyes. She knew he must have followed her out of the party. She'd excused herself when the pain began. She hadn't expected it to be that bad. She hadn't expected _that. _

"Thank you," she told him. "For helping me. For staying with me."

He shook his head. "You don't have to thank me for being a decent human being."

She squeezed his hand. "But for the longest time, I didn't think you were one. I know the war changed you- it changed everyone- but even though we go to all these social events together, we never talk. We just bicker like we're still children." She paused, bit her lip, and then continued. "I like bickering with you, you know," she admitted. "It's like nothing's really changed. It's comforting."

He nodded. "I know. It's nice to not bicker as well, though."

"Yeah," she murmured, and then he got the feeling that she was drifting very far away from him. "I supposed I should owl Harry," she said finally. "I suppose I should owl Ron too- I just don't want to."

"Don't," he told her. "Just rest. You need it. I've already owled Harry, don't worry. Just rest."

She nodded. She wouldn't have fallen asleep had she not been administered a slow-acting sleeping potion. He was grateful for it. He wanted her to sleep through the pain and weariness. She deserved it.

He held her hand as she slept and wondered why he was still there. She watched her as she dreamed, and she was still beautiful. He decided that no one could pull off half-dead the way that she could. He watched her float on peacefully, unaware of the pains her waking self bore. She didn't look so wildly unhappy anymore.

* * *

He fell asleep just as the first rays of sunlight infiltrated the grim hospital room. He didn't sleep long, though, before the Boy Who Lived to Annoy and his sidekick began making a ruckus in the hallway. He stood slowly, aware that his joints would protest heavily to the position he'd slept in, and eavesdropped shamelessly.

It seemed that Harry had gotten the owl, rather belatedly, and alerted The Weasel that his wife was in critical condition. The pair had apparated to the hospital, only to find out that there was no Hermione Weasley registered yet, just someone in the maternity ward who hadn't filled out her paperwork yet. So that was where they went, though wondering if Draco was just setting them up for something. They apparently hadn't forgotten the old rivalries the way she had.

"Family only," came the nasally snarl of the nurse. Draco recognized her as the same one who'd attempted to kick him out the night before. He'd claimed to be her husband, but Weasley really was.

"I'm her husband!" Weasley exclaimed.

"Her husband's already in there with her," the nurse informed him. "Get out of my corridor."

Draco reluctantly walked to the door, looked one last time at her sweet, sleeping face, and then walked into the fray. "Harry, Ron," he said curtly in greeting. He handed them the clipboard. "Here, you fill this out- I don't know anything about her medical history and stuff."

"YOU!" Ron bellowed. "_You_ told them you were her husband! What the hell!"

"Sorry, I didn't realize you wanted me to leave her alone and unconscious. Next time she starts bleeding uncontrollably and passes out, I'll keep that in mind."

He left an angry Ron sputtering in the hallway while Harry filled out the paperwork. She was awake, no doubt pulled from her slumber by her oaf of a husband's shouting.

"They're here," he stated unnecessarily.

She shook her head. She looked deathly pale again. "Please, don't… I don't want to see Ron right now. Please. I can't… and tell him… tell him, if he threatens to divorce me, that the papers are in the bottom drawer of my nightstand."

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. "I wanted to be ready," she explained. "And I had seriously considered it before. I'm seriously considering it now. I just don't think I can ignore it anymore." She meant the adultery, he knew. It was amazing she'd ever tried to ignore it, but Hermione wasn't a woman to give up without a fight. She also wasn't a woman to persist in doomed causes.

He left her again, even more reluctantly, and met Weasley in the hall. "She doesn't want to see you," he informed the shorter man. "Frankly, I don't blame her."

"What happened?" Ron asked angrily. "Why is she even in here? Why doesn't she want to see me? Why does she want to see _you_? What's going on?"

It would have been funny for Draco to see Ron so flustered had he not just realized that he'd have to tell the other man that his wife had just miscarried their baby. Ron was an idiot, but he loved his children, and this would be a deep blow to him. The realization had a very sobering effect, and Draco wished, not for the first time, that none of it had happened.

"Look, Weasley, you've screwed up with her. She's scared and vulnerable and is afraid of what you may do or say, because you don't have a great record with comforting her. I'm the one who took care of her and brought her here, so she's just being clingy. It's natural."

"She hates you," Ron sneered.

"No, _you_ hate me, and you assume she feels the same." Ron had cheated on his wife, but had lost his unborn son, and for that Draco couldn't manage to feel anything past pity towards him, irritating as he was. "Look, just go get Harry and talk to a doctor."

He could tell Ron wanted a fight, but he went anyway. He was scared. If Draco didn't want to tell him, it had to be bad. He may have been a less-than-perfect husband, but he didn't want something terrible to happen to her.

He watched Weasley and Potter retreat in search of Healer Gregory and then went back into Hermione's room.

"You okay?" He asked.

She nodded, looking more childlike than he'd ever seen her. "Yeah."

"I didn't tell him," he told her. "I sent him to find the healer. He'll be back though."

"I know… I just want this to be over with."

"I'll be right back." He disappeared and reappeared in a flash before handing her a vial of purple potion. "Take this," he said softly. "It'll help you go to back sleep. I'll deal with them."

She did, and fell back asleep almost instantly. He repositioned the blankets around her before going back to the hall to meet Harry and Ron and whatever other Weasley's they brought with them. He couldn't save her from them, he knew, but he could let her sleep through the worst of it. He would do that for her.

* * *

The Weasleys never came. Ron went home alone, a broken man, and Draco pitied him. Harry took Hermione back to Grimmauld Place. Draco watched as he led her out, his hand on the small of her back and then his fingers wrapped tightly in hers as they flooed together. She looked small and weak, but she was beautiful. In fact, it almost frightened him how much he thought of her as beautiful. He realized when she turned around to catch his eye that she had told Ron about the bottom drawer of her nightstand. She was broken and giving up.

He felt strange seeing her go. He'd brought her in, taken care of her; it seemed fitting that he should have taken her home as well. But Potter was her friend, not him, and Potter was better equipped to help her handle the loss and the divorce.

He went home, but it was all motions and no thought. He wondered how she was. He wondered what had happened after they'd sorted out who her real family was and, realizing their error and his lie, had sent him back to the waiting room. He wondered what she was doing now.

He felt pathetic that night as he lay in bed. He couldn't sleep, even though he realized he hadn't slept in days. He hadn't felt like that in years, since before the war was over, during his sixth year at Hogwarts.

He'd hoped the rumors were untrue. There were rumors about everyone in the public eye, after all, especially the Quidditch players. The fact that Ron was a Keeper for the Canons as well as a member of the infamous Golden Trio only heightened the media's desire to expose scandals and start rumors. He'd comforted himself with that knowledge, and told himself it was nothing to worry over. He had convinced himself that she was a big girl, and she could handle the gossip, especially since it wasn't true. He hadn't considered the possibility that she couldn't, and it was.

Around three in the morning, he decided that honesty maybe really was the best policy, and vowed to stop lying to himself.

* * *

He didn't see her for weeks after she was discharged, though he made an effort to keep up with her through wizarding tabloids and newspapers. He gathered that the rumors about Ron had been true, and that the couple was divorcing. He even found a full-page spread about Hermione and the children. The article said that Rose and Hugo had been pulled from Hogwarts for a week to stay with their mother. That, he could believe; he could imagine her pulling her children out of school in what would probably be a vain attempt to tell them the news before they found out from less comforting sources.

Someone had managed to get a snapshot of her with the children at the train station. She looked better, he noticed with a smile, and beautiful as always.

He carefully folded the tabloid and added it to the stack he'd accumulated. Satisfied that she was doing well, he then proceeded to send large sums of money to the different tabloid owners with anonymous notes asking them to please mind their own damn business.

* * *

The next time he saw her, she was alone at Florish and Blotts. In all honesty, he _had _been going by the store more often than usual in hopes of catching her there, not that he'd ever say so. He was pleased to see that there was no cloud of paparazzi around her.

"Oh, hello, Hermione," he greeted her as he pretended to have just noticed her at the self of muggle books about parenting.

"Hello," she said a little less brightly. "How are you?"

"Good. Yourself?"

"I've been worse. Looking for books on single-parenting?" She asked.

He nodded and remembered belatedly his promise to stop lying. Old habits died hard. "I don't know why you're bothering, though; after mothering everyone in Hogwarts you could force under your wing, I think you'd be better suited for writing the books."

She laughed, and it was only slightly forced. "Actually, I'm looking for books for Ron. I'm hoping to find one that says very explicitly to respect and honor your ex-wife and give her sole custody."

He smiled. "Good luck with that."

She smiled but then looked up at him strangely. He had a strange urge to check his teeth for spinach. "I'm not made of glass," she said slowly. "What you saw in the hospital, that wasn't normal. You know I'm stronger than that. You don't have to make pleasant conversation with me because you're afraid I'm too weak for our usual repertoire, or because you feel bad for me."

He shook his head. "It's not that. It's just nice to talk to you."

When she looked into his grey eyes, she expected to detect a lie. She expected him to say hasty goodbyes and walk away. What she found instead startled her: it was almost as if he genuinely cared. "It's nice to talk to you too," she admitted. She vaguely recalled saying something of the sort to him before, in the hospital, but the whole experience was a general blur, with the exception of Ron storming into her room in a fit of despair and flying out in a fit of rage after she told him that it was over.

"You hungry?" He asked, and she nodded slowly. He wasn't supposed to be this nice when she wasn't bleeding, and she didn't understand it, but she liked it. "Dinner will be ready at the manor in half an hour, if you're interested in joining me."

She paused, then smiled. "That sounds lovely, thank you."

* * *

He couldn't picture her at a stuffy table with a different fork for every dish, so they ate on the back porch. Malfoy Manor was built a bit like the French palace Versailles, with the house at the top of the hill so that they had a clear view of the gardens and fountains in the backyard. It was stunningly gorgeous, and Hermione had to restrain herself from asking if she could just go and wander through the gardens. That would be rude, she reminded herself, when she'd only be invited for dinner.

The back of the manor faced west, so they watched the sunset as they ate. They made pleasant small talk, avoiding sensitive topics and subjects they suspected may be a little sore. They were both afraid that a simple wrong word would ruin the pleasantness and send them spiraling back to their pre-accident bickering. The bickering had been nice, Draco decided, but talking was better. He'd never really had a chance to talk to her before.

"Where are you living?" He asked curiously, carelessly. He wished he hadn't asked that moments after the words were out of his mouth, but it was too late.

She grimaced from distaste but answered. "Back at my parents', actually. Until the divorce is official, I can't buy my own place. I stayed with Harry and Ginny for a bit, while I was recovering, but I couldn't stand all the memories, and besides, Ron is Ginny's brother. She knows he was wrong, that he had it coming, and she would have picked me over him if it came down to choosing sides, but I couldn't ask her to do that."

"How are the children?" He asked softly. He'd been through the same thing, more or less, when he divorced Astoria, but she had two children instead of just one, and her divorce was more explosive.

"They're… children are smart, you know," she told him. "They'd been expecting it. Luckily I got to them before any of the other students got their gossip magazines. I just wish they didn't have to deal with this. I wish they didn't have to listen to any rumors about their dad. It's been nice, though, that the tabloids finally seemed to forget about us all at once. How was it for Scorpius?"

"Scorpius had a fairly easy time of it, I suppose, because you're right, children _are_ smart, and he knew that Astoria and I never loved each other, and our divorce was far less messy and public. When she married some foreign man with a better title than mine, she made a half-hearted attempt to take him with her, but he chose to stay with me. I think he adjusted well. I made him see a counselor anyway, though."

"Did it help?"

"The counselor?" He asked, and she nodded. "Yeah, I think the counselor helped, once he got over his irrational belief that I only sent him there because I thought he was insane and wanted some cheap babysitting. Would you like the address?"

She nodded, and he rummaged through his cloak in search of some paper and pens to write it down for her.

"Thanks," she said and pocketed the slip of paper. "I'll take them when they get home for the summer. They won't be thrilled, but it couldn't hurt, right? I just hope the divorce is final by then and we don't all end up living at my parents'."

"Hey," he said suddenly, remembering something very potentially important. "I've got a small house in Scotland you can live in, if you want."

"Define 'small'," she joked. "It's a very nice offer, thank you, but really, I couldn't."

"Sure you could!" He exclaimed, excited to have a reason to talk to her more often and to be in a position where he'd be taking care of her. Why hadn't he thought of the house before? Probably because had been abandoned before he was born, but he conveniently forgot that. "Really, it is small; it's only in the family through a series of marriages and isn't like any of the other manors and castles. It's more of a cottage than anything else. It's a bit run down, but from the pictures I've seen, it looks like it could be perfect for you."

She shook her head. "No, really, I couldn't. It would be too strange looking. I mean, how would it look to you if one of your friends suddenly had some woman living in one of their spare houses."

"I would assume that she was his mistress," he admitted.

"Exactly! I don't need that rumor getting to my children. Besides, there's a good chance I could win sole custody, and I'm not willing to jeopardize that."

But Draco was already scheming. "What if I charged you rent? You could have your money back, of course, later, but if I charged you rent it would go through Gringrotts and end up in the social papers, so everyone would know it was legitimate. And rent would be rather low because the place is in a state of rather sorry disrepair, though I'm sure you could fix it all quite easily."

She was tempted to say yes. She was _very _tempted to say yes. It sounded good. In fact, it sounded too good to be true. He hadn't been her enemy since the end of the war, but he certainly hadn't been her friend, and he was suddenly very interested in helping her? "Why are you helping me?" She asked solemnly.

He was slightly startled by the question. He had a few different answers- some that she would know were lies, some that _he_ would know were lies, and some that were mere half-truths. "You need an ally," he finally told her. "And you're really the only person from the Order who doesn't seem to care what I was forced into. You've made your peace with it all. So really, we both benefit."

But she was too smart. "No, that's no it. Plenty of people have forgiven you- the press covered your trial quite thoroughly and it all worked out in your favor. Some people aren't particularly fond of you, but they've forgiven you. Why are you so intent on helping me?"

He didn't want to tell her. He wanted to help her, and knew that the truth might scare her, and then she'd really be gone from him forever. She was in the middle of a divorce, for Merlin's sake, not to mention that she'd just had a miscarriage and had been cheated on for years. She may not have been made out of glass, but he knew she was still breakable. He couldn't tell her the truth, not right then. It wouldn't have been right, and it wouldn't have been fair to her. It would have hurt both of them.

Because Ron was partially his fault. He'd never admitted it to anyone, and tried not to admit it to himself, but he had come very close to loving her in her sixth year. He'd never told anyone, but she was the main reason he had hesitated to kill Dumbledore and the reason it'd taken him so long to fix the vanishing cabinet; he'd been buying her more time. She'd also been the reason he'd chosen his mode of communication with Rosmerta: it made him feel closer to her, to use a method she'd probably invented.

It was after that battle he realized he couldn't be with her. She'd never trust him, he knew. He hated to think she was safer with Weasley, but he knew she was. So he'd given up the claim he never had and sent Weasley a very detailed letter explaining exactly what would happen to certain parts of his anatomy should he screw up with her.

It seemed silly to think of now, 19 years later. Hogwarts was long over, as well as the war. But he'd never really forgotten her. He'd tried, with Astoria, but it never really worked. She was always there in the back of his mind.

Sometimes, he felt like Gatsby, and she was his Daisy.

He hoped to Merlin they would have a better ending.

* * *

I'm going to blame the suckiness and slowness of this one on my severe heat exhaustion / possibly mild heatstroke. I have no idea what happened, really, except I was kind of all over the place and should probably not have driven myself home. So review because you feel bad for me.

I like reviews more than breaking the food curse!


	8. In a shoe box in her closet

Not epilogue compatible, but pretty much DH compatible, I think.

* * *

**_In A Shoe Box In Her Closet..._**

"Why are you with me?" He asked her as she stepped out of the bathroom.

"What?" She asked, shocked, and more from a desire to buy herself time. She had heard the question and she understood the question; she didn't understand the question's motive.

He moved across the room towards her, crowing her personal space. Her plans to rejoin the rest of the party downstairs in the backyard were momentarily forgotten. "Why are you with me?" He said more slowly.

She reached for him, to hold his hand and smooth his hair from his face, but he pulled away. "What's wrong?" She whispered. He hadn't scared her in years, since his trial after the war when she'd come to see him as more of a manipulated child than true evil villain. He'd grown and she'd realized he was no longer a boy, but she'd lost her ability to be afraid of him. That didn't mean he wasn't scaring her at the moment, though.

"Why. Are. You. With. _Me_." He repeated forcefully, enunciating each syllable.

"Because I love you!" She cried defensively.

"No!" He was radiating anger and pushed her down the hall and through her open bedroom door. He kicked it shut and cast a silencing spell without turning away from her.

"What the hell is wrong?" She asked, confused and annoyed.

"You! You're all wrong for me, you know that? You're insufferable and annoying as hell sometimes, and you're such a damn know-it-all and you're the brains of the Golden Trio! You _like_ to read, and you care about house-elves and all the other damn creatures in the world and you have an irritating desire to be everyone's mummy and even more obnoxious is your superhero 'I can save the world!' complex! Do you have any idea how nauseatingly _perfect_ you are?"

She was confused and hurt that he had just made her feel like crap for simply existing. "I'm sorry?" She offered.

He looked at her and shook his head angrily. No, she couldn't just apologize with those big doe eyes and expect to be forgiven. She didn't even realize what he was angry about. She didn't know that he knew she wasn't as nauseatingly perfect as everyone else seemed to think, as he _had_ thought.

"That's not good enough," he breathed.

"What's this about?" She asked nervously. She wasn't scared of him, but he wasn't acting like himself.

"Why are you with me?" He whispered again, his voice a dangerous, foreign tone. "Are you with me to screw me over? To have a good laugh later about how you fooled the coldhearted Draco Malfoy? So you can finally hurt me for hurting you when we were children? Is this payback for fighting on the wrong side during the war? Some sort of sick revenge?"

"What the hell are you talking about?" She hissed and he advanced on her, and she stumbled across the room until her back was to the wall.

When he stepped away from her, she was relieved, until he threw a pink box at her. She didn't have to open it to remember what was inside.

"These are old, you know," she said defensively. "He was stupid and never dated his letters, but I promise you, they're old."

"You kept them."

"Well, yes, but-"

"What am I, then? Just a fun romp to help you bide your time until he comes back to you? A very poor attempt at making him jealous?"

"No!"

"What am I then?"

"An insecure little boy who bullies people to make himself feel better!" She spat. "You've been waiting for this, haven't you? All this commitment and fidelity, and you've just been waiting for a good time to break it off because this scares you! This is the excuse you've been waiting for, isn't it? And now you're going to throw a fit and issue ultimatums and you're going to make me feel like crap and then you're going to leave, and you're going to tell your friends and family that it didn't work out because I'm "still in love with my ex"! It's a nice excuse, isn't it? Because they won't pry and so they won't realize that it's a load of bullcrap!"

"It's not! You _are_ in love with him, aren't you? For Merlin's sake, Hermione, normal women don't save love letters from their exes!"

"Yes they do! Normal women save everything! God, my mother still even has a box in the attic of her things from her senior prom, decades ago, and my father doesn't accuse her of loving her prom date!"

"Don't distract me with confusing muggle references right now! We're having a serious discussion!"

She shook her head angrily and shoved him. "No, you're yelling at me and trying to break up with me!"

He shook his head angrily and shoved her. "No, you're yelling at _me_ and accusing me of being a manipulative twit!"

"You _are_ a manipulative twit! And you know what, I get it, okay? You weren't raised in a world where people love and care about each other, and you don't understand the affection and concern, even after being tenuous friends with everyone for years. That's not your fault, I get it, but you can't push me away. You don't even care about the letters, do you?"

He didn't answer. He wasn't used to his psyche being evaluated and stepped away from her. In the silence, the laughter of the party floated up to them, and it was juxtaposed strangely with the tension in her room. People couldn't be laughing and having a good time while the floor threatened to disappear from beneath her feet, could they?

"Is that why you never cared that I didn't tell you that I loved you?" He asked, changing the subject. "Because you knew I was so emotionally damaged?" He clarified. He wasn't angry anymore. He could fight her until they both tore the world apart with their bare hands, he knew, but he just didn't feel like fighting her anymore.

"I _did _care," she murmured. "But if it wasn't how you felt, I couldn't make you feel that way. If you weren't ready to say it, I couldn't force you to. But I never just didn't care that you didn't love me. Every single time I said it and you didn't say anything, or just kissed me or nodded or any of the other hundreds of asinine gestures you did to reciprocate, it hurt. It hurt like hell. But I kept saying it because I wanted you to know, and every single time I said it, I hoped you would say it back. But you never did."

He wanted to stop and go back in time. He wanted to pretend that he hadn't opened the damn box out of curiosity. He wanted to have never spilt the damn wine on his shirt and never have gone into her closet looking for his spare. But he couldn't, even with magic, and he was stuck watching her cry while he re-evaluated his entire life.

"I'm sorry I hurt you," he whispered.

"You didn't do anything," she muttered back. She wiped her eyes with her sleeves and he avoided her gaze. "I won't leave you alone, you know," she told him. "You can try to walk out on me now, but I won't leave you alone, and you won't want me to."

He tried to chuckle but it came out as a rasping breath. "Why did you keep the letters?" He asked again, more softly, evading.

"Because that was an important time in my life in a lot of aspects. Dating Ron was brief, but it was an important chapter in my life, and it pushed me to you, eventually. I didn't keep the letters because I'm still in love with him. I was never in love with him to begin with. I love him as a brother, though, and when I'm old and can't even tie my own shoes, I want to remember my life as it was, completely, even the awkward stages."

He'd known, of course, that she wasn't in love with Ron. He could tell just by looking at her. He'd been angry when he found the letters, but he had known almost as suddenly that it didn't mean anything. "I have to tell you something," he told her slowly.

"Okay."

"It scares me that I don't give a damn about the letters," he admitted.

"Okay," she breathed.

"It's not," he retorted, but he touched her shoulders and pulled her closer. She stepped into his embrace and rested her heart right above his heart, but they both knew he was not comforting her; she was comforting him.

"It's not okay," he continued. "You deserve better. You deserve someone who doesn't freak out at genuine human emotion. I'm sorry that isn't me."

"You're too hard on yourself," she whispered.

He shook his head. "No, no, I'm not. You're right, you know, about everything; you always are." He paused, and repeated his early question, though the motivation was different. "Why are you with me?" He asked.

"Because I love you," she responded and her hand found his.

He squeezed her fingers, reminding himself that she was really there, she was real. "I love you too."

* * *

I do love writing fight scenes. And there was not one mention of food in this whole chapter! I'm already itching to write the next one-shot, and it may end up being my longest yet, so you'll have to be patient with me, especially since I'm working five shifts this weekend instead of my normal two at the horse barn and I have a nasty habit of dehydrating. The wait should be worth it, though. So please be kind with reviews :)

I like reviews more than having my own prom box in my closet.


	9. The Emasculation of Draco Malfoy

Not DH compatible. And I lied and updated early! Except the next one is the one that is going to take a while, especially since I was asked to unexpectedly work an extra shift at the barn this afternoon.

* * *

**_The Emasculation of Draco Malfoy_**

"You want me to buy you WHAT?" He asked incredulously. Surely, he had misheard her.

"I want you to go to the store and buy tampons, please. I planned to pick some up tomorrow, but my period came three days early and I can't leave this potion unattended."

"I'll watch the potion!" He said desperately, but she shook his head.

"It's complicated, and I can't afford to screw up- I've spent too much time on this already." He agreed with that much- he'd barely seen her in the last four days and was fairly sure that she had begun to sleep in her potions lab. The first day and a half had been a nice change of pace from the usual popping up she did at his place to nag him, but then he'd found that he actually _missed_ her incessant and demanding self, so he'd started showing up at her place and nagging _her_. So far, all he'd managed to do was pull her away for a half-hour lunch break two days ago and get yelled at for distracting her the next day. He thought kissing her neck was a fairly worthy distraction, though.

He didn't want to repeat the last four days. He also didn't want to buy her tampons, though.

"Look, I'll give you some muggle money and you can go to the convenience store on the corner. No one will recognize you, not that many people will be out this time of night. It's really no big deal," she assured him.

"Yes it is! Hermione, when a man buys tampons for his girlfriend, it means he's whipped."

"Don't be kinky," she muttered absently as she carefully measured a vial of a greenish goo. Under any other circumstances, he would have laughed and told her to get her mind of the gutter because "whipped" did not necessarily entail real whips and chains, unless she was into that sort of stuff. He felt like he was about to lay his head on the block, though, and couldn't bear the thought of laughing.

"I won't do it," he insisted adamantly. Showing up at eight with take-out from her favorite restaurant was pathetic enough; buying tampons would be mortifying.

"I won't see you for another week, then," she told him matter-of-factly.

He glared at her, but she was too busy pouring the green goo into the bubbling vat to notice. "Can't you get someone else to do it?" He begged. "Like Ginny or Luna or someone."

She turned and raised her eyebrows at him. "No, because I asked _you_, and even if one of them ends up going to the store for me, I can promise you it'll be more than a week before you see me again."

"Hermione…" he whined.

"Stop being so childish," she snapped. "Harry does it for Ginny. Ron does it for Luna. My father does it for my mother. It's a perfectly natural part of life."

"No, it's something embarrassing that women make men do in a passive aggressive attempt to make themselves feel better about…. Well, that thing that happens.

"_That thing that happens_ is painful and embarrassing, but women don't really have a choice in the matter, do they?" She asked rhetorically. "No. It's not like I'm asking you to have sympathy cramps or god forbid go through childbirth. I think you could do this much."

She said it in the tone that added a silent "or else" to the statement. He knew he could either go to the store like she asked or face one of her infamous feminist speeches.

He decided to go to the store.

* * *

He got to the store much too quickly for his liking and assessed the situation. There was exactly one other patron, for which he was glad. The girl behind the counter looked too exhausted to care that he was buying tampons. That was good. He could get in, get it, and get out.

The tampons were in the second aisle. She'd told him to look for the box with the big flower on it and get the regular size. He could do that. He scanned the aisle quickly, efficiently, eager to spend as little time in the store as possible. He was relieved that they had exactly what she'd described to him. Next step: register, he thought to himself. He could do it. He could.

He was halfway to the register when the door open and a group a men entered the store. He suddenly wished he'd stayed for the feminist speech as Harry, Ron, Dean, and Seamus walked in and simultaneously gaped at him. What were they even doing there? They couldn't _all_ be buying tampons, could they?

But when they began to laugh, he came to the realization that it was unrealistic to have even hoped they could magically all be buying tampons. No, it was just him being embarrassed.

"Didn't know you were like that," Ron sneered.

Draco glared back, but the comments continued. "Glad to see Hermione wears the pants in the relationship," Dean smirked.

"So after this, are you going to go home and rub her feet and massage her back and then talk about your feelings?" Seamus gibed.

"You know, you better make sure you got the right brand. Merlin knows she may cut off your balls if you screw up," Dean paused, then added. "Although maybe a world free of Malfoy progeny is just what we need."

"Does Hermione know about this?" Ron asked. "I think she has a right to know that she's dating a girl."

"Don't worry mate, maybe one day she won't need tampons anymore, and then you can go to Lamaze classes together," Seamus added.

Draco glared at them and then Harry in turn. "What about you, Boy Who Lived to Annoy? Don't you have something snarky to say?"

Harry shook his head. "No, but she's probably waiting. Ginny always gets crazy when she's waiting for me to get back- I can imagine it's rather uncomfortable for them."

They didn't goad Harry after his confession that he also bought his girlfriend tampons. But of course they didn't; they _liked _Harry. Draco gave the lot of them a scathing look before paying for the damn tampons and leaving. It didn't matter that Ron did the same for Luna, or that Dean and Seamus had probably done the same for their own girlfriends; none of them had been caught in the act, so they could all laugh at him.

He wondered if there was a spell he could use to make _them _bleed from strange orifices once a month. Maybe he'd just break their noses.

* * *

When he got back to Hermione's house, she was still in the potions lab. This time, she was adding some strange yellow powder to the cauldron.

"I got your tampons," he said unnecessarily.

"Thanks," she said without looking up. "Harry came by a few minutes ago. He said he was out with the boys and dashed into a convenience store to try some muggle beer. He left some in the fridge for you. Said you might need them." She finally looked up curiously. "Why would he say that?"

"Because your friends are gits," he told her frankly as it set down the box on an empty space of tabletop. "And I'm never getting you tampons again."

* * *

This was short and sweet and fun to write, but not particularly meaningful. Feedback is welcome!

I like reviews more than _not_ getting my period three days early.


	10. Understanding Women

Completely disregards DH and other chunks of interfering material. And dedicated to Kaleesha for being so petulant about me updating (and really, no, updating does _not _cure headaches) and for the happy occasion of a certain someone telling her that he loves her… it may have been awkward but it's still sweet! No we just have to make him buy you tampons…

Please remember that I am not an actual psychologist or something and furthermore, some of what I actually think was warped to fit the story. You'll understand the disclaimer soon enough.

_**Understanding Women**_

* * *

"Help me understand women."

"It's two in the morning," she yawned and leaned her head against the doorframe, tucking her head into the crook of her elbow to save her bleary eyes from the harsh light of the hallway.

"Wow, Granger, I didn't realize you could tell time- you really must be the Brightest Witch of Our Age," he sneered.

"Ga ah beh," she insisted, though her statement was lost in her yawn.

"Ahh oou eeeeh," he mocked, and she lazily punched him in the arm.

"Goodnight," she said definitively. "We have class together tomorrow- well, today, in six hours- and I, for one, will be there."

He chuckled. "I, for one, will _not_." He said in a mockingly prim voice.

She managed a tired glare before trying to shut the door. His reflexes were faster than hers on a normal day, though, much less when she was exhausted, having just and only barely woken up, and he was hyped up on caffeine like a normal college student.

"What do you want?" She asked.

"Help me understand women, Granger."

She shook her head. "Tell me why."

He gave her an annoyed glare, but she had gone back to studying the insides of her eyelids. "Well, if you must know, the woman I love, the sexy vixen Tiffa, has dumped me. Again. She said I just didn't understand her. So you're going to help me understand women so that when she finally takes me back there's no more of this rollercoaster. The make-up sex is amazing, of course, but I figure we'll just have little fights without ever actually breaking up."

She blinked and tried to imagine that he hadn't just said that, but for the life of her she could figure out what he could have said that would have sounded like what she thought she heard. She then attempted to convince herself that her precious ears had not just been violated with mentions of Draco Malfoy's sex life.

She was not successful with either endeavor.

"I will not aid your dysfunctional relationship," she told him flatly and yawned again.

"I will pay your tuition."

"I have it covered with loans and scholarships. Ask around, though, someone's bound be de desperate enough for tuition to talk to you."

He shook his head. "No. I picked you for a reason, Granger: you're smart, you get people, and you're a decent teacher. Merlin knows you had enough practice teaching Potter and Weasley back at Hogwarts. So now I want you to teach me women."

"No."

"What will it take to make you change your mind?"

"Lots of sleep. Goodnight." She shut the door in his face, and this time, he let her. She would come around, he knew. He just wouldn't give her a choice.

**

* * *

**

By the next morning, Hermione had convinced herself that she'd only dreamt her strange encounter with Malfoy. She'd dreamt stranger things, she knew; once, after indulging in far too much chocolate and ice cream with her cousin over summer holidays, she had a very trippy dreams about flying a plane with a monkey and landing at the beach on the moon to eat purple and orange sandwiches. She decided to chalk it up to reading too much about Wizarding Genealogy and not eating properly the night before and left her dorm quite content.

She walked from the dorm hall to the building with the classrooms happily. It was a fine fall day, and in a few short months she would graduate. She felt nostalgic, but happy; it'd been a long four years.

Merlin University was a small but prestigious college, and the only wizarding college in Europe, housing students from nearly every European country. Only a handful of students bothered to attend, as it was unnecessary for most jobs. Minister of Magic hopefuls attended the school, along with those who wanted to master certain subjects. Therefore, Hermione had been more than a bit confused when she saw Draco on campus.

He had improved over the years, she had to admit. The war had taken a lot from his family- the manor, the status, and numerous kin- and while enough funds had been tied up in secret accounts, he was by no means the arrogant aristocrat he had once been. Hermione had found that humility was a strange thing on the blonde prat, but it suited him well. They'd become tenuous study partners from necessity as the only two fluent English speaking students in the potions department, but had become friends. To some extent.

That didn't mean she hadn't laughed when he found out the academic requirements at Merlin. While she had been thrilled that typical muggle classes such as foreign languages and mathematics were required, "appalled" would have aptly described Draco. She had found it rather amusing.

What she did not find amusing, though, was showing up to her first class two minutes early only to find her seat already taken by the little weasel. He wasn't even supposed to _be _at this class- he never was! He hated learning Spanish and made sure everyone damn well knew it and she suddenly realized what he was up to.

"You can't pester me into helping you," she told him and opted to sit a few seats to the right of her normal seat. She'd have to swab it with disinfectant before she sat there again.

"Sure I can," he grinned lazily. "Because this is your seat, and it bothers you deeply that I won't give it to you. And you're also rather upset that I woke you up last night, and that it was not, in fact, just a dream. Whether you like it or not, Granger, you're going to help me. And I have a feeling that you're not really going to like it."

She made a childish face at him and thanked the gods that the professor arrived and saved her from having to further converse with the git who had stolen her seat.

**

* * *

**

But the git who had stolen her seat refused to leave her alone. He stole her book bag and insisted on carrying it to lunch for her, and then the library. Every other sentence he spoke to her was punctuated with a succinct "help me." She couldn't recall a time when she'd said "no" as many times, except for when Ronald wanted sex. _That_ was nevergoing to be a "yes."

He was tenacious, she would give him that. Even after giving her back her books, he followed her around, pestering her, sending her short notes whenever he could. She found it rather exasperating, especially after he began to talk to her professors about how very unhelpful she was being. She didn't want them to think she was involved in some strange affair with Malfoy, especially when she most definitely was _not_, nor would she ever be.

So Hermione Granger, ever the composed perfectionist, refused to show her irritation and continued to deny his demands. By the second week, she didn't even think it would have been that difficult—in fact, the idea had even begun to intrigue her a bit—but she refused to give up on principle. Draco Malfoy simply had to learn that he could not bully people into submission, and she was more than willing to teach him _that_ lesson.

After accidentally laying on top of him, though, her resolve wavered.

"What the fuck!" He hissed, waking up suddenly as she screeched and pulled her wand out of her pocket. Moments ago, she'd been exhausted from studying at the library until closing, but was now alert and filled with enough adrenaline to run a marathon.

"What are you doing in my room at midnight?" She snarled, only slightly relieved to find it was him. While she was glad it hadn't been some sort of psycho-killer, she wasn't exactly thrilled to see Malfoy.

"Why did you try to lie on top of me! Merlin, if you'd wanted me in bed, you only had to ask, but give a guy some warning!" He jested as he extricated herself from her

She punched his arm. He'd almost forgotten how well she could do that. "You were in my room—in my bed!—in the middle of the night. I was irritated and tired and didn't expect to find someone in my room, so I didn't bother with the lights. Your turn to explain yourself, and if you ask that insipid question, I will not hesitate to hex you."

He grinned at her. "I was waiting for you so I could ask that insipid question."

She punched him again, but this time he caught her fist before it collided with his arm and forced her fingers to intertwine with his. "How did you get in," she asked, annoyed, as she tried to shake her fingers from his.

"Security around the campus is impeccable," he told her. "However, once in the buildings, even the weakest 'alohomora' will suffice. It's quite convenient, really."

She finally managed to shake her hand loose and shoved him towards the door. "Get out," she barked.

"Just say yes, and you'll barely ever see me again," he offered temptingly. "I promise, you'll only see me for lessons every few days and maybe a few times in the halls—it _is_ a small school, you know—but I'll stop pestering you. And believe me, showing up in your bed isn't one iota of what I'm capable of. I could always show up in your shower or your boyfriend's dorm while the two of you snog, or do whatever you do to demonstrate affection. I rather think either alternative would be more mortifying than this."

The casual mention of her boyfriend reminded Hermione that he was already a bit peeved that Draco was bothering her as much as he was. He had made multiple offers to hex the blond prat, but Hermione had restrained him; she was too fond of Peter to watch Draco hex him into oblivion in retaliation. I wasn't that she didn't have faith in Peter, it was just that she knew Draco had far more experience with dark magic and was a bit vicious when he needed to be. And so alright, she didn't have much faith in Peter.

She knew that Draco popping up annoyed Peter greatly and was beginning to threaten their relationship. Even Peter had told her to just give in, as Draco's interest in understanding women was bound to fade quickly, once he understood the complexity of the situation.

So maybe giving up wouldn't be so dastardly, Hermione decided. And she comforted herself with the knowledge that she could later claim she would have been willing to do anything to have her bed to herself so she could go to sleep.

"Fine."

His eyes widened in shock. It was almost better than the time she'd punched him in their third year at Hogwarts. "Really?"

"Yes, really. Now get out of my room."

He smiled. It vaguely reminded her of the way a psycho killer might smile at his next victim. "Great, Granger. Now I can go back to spending my free time with Tiffa."

"I thought you were broken up."

"Oh, we were," he retorted flippantly. She'd noticed that he'd become less dramatic but more theatric since graduating Hogwarts, and it was grating on her nerves. "But that was two weeks ago. We got back together again, had another fight, and got back together two days ago. See, with your help, that a whole three days of fucking I wouldn't have lost."

She blanched, but he was already swaggering out of her room. Sometimes she thought he behaved himself more like a gay pirate than a true womanizer.

**

* * *

**

When he showed up in her room later that day, finally saying something other than "help me", she was prepared. She'd realized, of course, that there was no way in hell he'd ever understand women without growing a vagina, but she was determined to make him understand as much as he could.

She'd decided to begin with a basic dichotomy of women. She gave him some parchment and a quill and transfigured her poster depicting the twelve uses of dragon's blood into a chalkboard and her pen became a piece of chalk.

She wrote "women" on the left side of the board and then drew a bracket. "Alright, Malfoy, women pretty much fall into two categories for you: able to tolerate your crap and actually have a relationship with you, and unable to tolerate your crap and actually have a relationship with you. But that's rather lengthy, so we'll just refer to the two categories as Draco-compatible and not Draco-compatible." She wrote the two categories on the board and turned, half-expecting to find that he'd already grown bored and left. She was shocked to find that he was actually taking notes. Or maybe he was just concentrating on coloring or something. She couldn't really tell. So she continued.

"You don't really need to learn anything about women in the not Draco-compatible category," she told him. "So we'll just skip through them quickly. Basically, in this category, you have anyone with half a brain."

He laughed humorously and chucked a piece of hard candy at her head. "This is not what I'm paying you for."

She rolled her eyes. "That's because you're not _paying_ me for anything."

"If I really did pay your tuition, would you be less snarky?"

"No," she answered flatly and returned to the board. "Okay, so in the not Draco-compatible category, you have the career-oriented women, the super family-oriented women, the feminists, the psychobitches and freaks, and the bookworms."

"What!" He cried in mock surprise. "You don't mean to tell me that we aren't compatible, do you, Granger? Oh, please say it isn't true! I don't think my poor heart could bear it!"

She shot him an unamused look at he sobered slowly so she could continue. "_Anyway_, I think they're all basically understandable based on their titles. The basic thing to remember is that you need to treat them with respect, because even if they aren't yours for shagging, they may be friends with someone you want to impress. And really, it's generally not a good idea to have women as enemies. We can be rather vicious, you see; the phrase "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" isn't mere happenstance."

She swore he wrote down "Granger is a bitch" in his notebook, but decided to ignore him; hopefully, he'd get tired of her lessons soon and go away.

"So then we have the women who _are_ Draco Malfoy compatible. That's the basic variety you've already been dating: sluts, heiresses and gold-diggers. They all want you, but for different reasons; sluts want to use you for your body—"

"Which I'm okay with!" He interjected.

"Heiresses want to use you for your status, and gold-diggers want to use you for your wealth, obviously," she continued, ignoring his outburst.

"So basically, no one wants me for me. Oh, what a shame," he said in his sing-song voice. She seriously considered having his personality tested at that moment. "So what category does Tiffa fall under?" He asked curiously.

She thought about it. "Well, having never actually met her, I'm going to guess that she's an heiress dating you because you're the most sought-after bachelor at Merlin," she told him frankly. She saw the look in his eye, though, that almost looked like hurt and self-doubt, beneath his façade of carefree sarcasm. "But you know your relationship is more than just a mutual desire to use each other."

He smiled at her brightly and she doubted what she had seen. "Oh, no, it is. The fact that I happen to love her doesn't factor into the equation."

She rolled her eyes. He was back to being mercurial as ever. "Anyway, those of the basic categories of women. Of course, a lot of categories overlap. A lot of gold-diggers are sluts, and women who want careers are sometimes heiresses. And it's important to remember that all women can be psychobitches on occasion."

"Like you?"

She glared but he merely grinned at her. "Okay, that's enough for today. I have a paper to finish and you have a girlfriend to shag, apparently."

He smirked arrogantly. "You know, maybe if you'd shag Petey every once in a while you wouldn't be so uptight, Granger."

"His name is _Peter_," she corrected him as she tried to conceal a blush. "And we've decided to save ourselves for marriage. We don't been to prove anything."

He sneered. "And I'm the Easter Bunny."

She shoved him out of the room. "_Goodbye_."

"Bye, Granger" he chirped as he left to find Tiffa, probably. She erased the chalkboard, turned it back into a poster, and went back to writing her paper.

And maybe she would see Peter later.

**

* * *

**

The next time she saw Draco, she had no warning before he plopped himself across from her as she quietly ate her lunch alone in the dining hall.

"Your lessons suck," he told her in greeting. "Tiffa and I just fought and broke up again."

"Try being less of an asshole, then," she snapped.

"What's up your arse?" He retorted.

"You know what your lesson is today?" She asked angrily and rhetorically. "You need to learn that women have periods and it makes them miserable and hormonal and men need to feel bad!"

He'd never been afraid of her, but he began to recognize that the bushy-haired brunette in front of him was not, in fact, Hermione Granger. No, it was a hormonal time bomb dressed like Hermione Granger. "Um… I'm sorry?" He offered pitifully.

"You should be! And after you learn that, you need to go a step farther and learn that until you actually experience vaginal bleeding for yourself, you can't tell a woman that she's just being a drama queen! Because yes, some women will say that it doesn't hurt, but it's different for everyone and if I say it hurts and I feel like crap in general, I am not being overdramatic for attention!"

"Peter?" He guessed as she violently stabbed her salad.

"Peter," she spat in confirmation. She took a bite of salad before realizing that she didn't feel like eating at all. With a sigh, she pushed her plate towards him, and he happily accepted the peace offering of food. "But we didn't break up, because that's what _normal,_ civilized _adults_ do—they fight, but they stay together because they know that at the end of the day, they still want to be together and they can overcome whatever they're arguing about."

"That was terribly didactic."

"Why thank you."

He didn't manage to come up with a clever retort, though, as something beyond her shoulder suddenly caught his attention. She turned to see what he was looking up just in time to see a blur of a blonde woman running across the dining hall, receiving stares of both confusion and desire.

Draco stumbled out of the seat and made his way across the hall towards her.

"Drakey!" She cried and launched herself at him. He caught her skinny frame easily and her legs wrapped around his waist as they enthusiastically snogged. Hermione couldn't help but notice how similar they looked; they were both tall, skinny, blonde, pale, and with high aristocratic cheekbones. She was disgusted by both their public display of affection and the incestuous feeling it gave her. Watching them was really quite revolting, and she was suddenly glad she hadn't eaten much.

"I'm sorry I yelled at you," Tiffa said as her hands roamed his hair and his back.

"I'm sorry I broke up with you."

"Let's never fight again!"

"Never," he agreed, and then they resumed snogging as he carried her to the door. Hermione noticed, though, that he missed the front doors. After realizing that he'd carried her to a broom cupboard, she realized he hadn't made a mistake after all.

**

* * *

**

"How do you remember the different uses of the different parts of a holly bush? Peter asked Hermione as they studied in the library. "They're so confusing! Because the parts are used for very different things and sometimes the same thing and it's just a mess."

She shrugged and continued to study spanish. "I just diagrammed it and memorized the diagrams."

"Well, that's not helpful," he sulked. She glanced up at him a moment before returning to the tomes in front of her. He'd get over it; he was a big boy. He was usually reasonable, she knew, but with exams approaching, he'd gotten a bit snappish. Hell, _everyone_ had gotten a bit snappish.

"Sorry," she muttered back and quickly wrote something into her notes. Her last exam was in a few short hours and she couldn't afford to spend time helping him at the moment, nor did she have the patience for his attitude.

He muttered something under his breath, and she didn't bother to ask for clarification. It was something snarky, probably, and underhanded. She knew they cared deeply for one another, but their relationship had been on thin ice since the stress of midterms had taken over, making them both more than just testy. Things would be better after the testing, and then it would be the holidays. It would all work out just fine.

He brooded for the next two hours as he moved on from potions to magical creatures. When she left, he didn't acknowledge her departure or wish her good luck. She hadn't expected him to, though; he had a nasty habit of holding grudges.

She dropped her books off at her room and made her way quickly to the classroom, anxious to be out of the cold snow. "Oi, Granger!" An annoying voice sounded from behind her as she slipped along the icy path to the other building.

She turned clumsily, clad in her heavy coat and thick sweaters, to face the blonde git that popped into her life at the most inconvenient times. "What, Malfoy?" She called as he caught up to her on the path.

"Just so you know, when I fall on the ground and clutch my throat, pretending to be choking and in desperate need of the heimleich, that's your cue to sneak into Professor Grindendale's desk and steal the answer key. Then just think about the answers very loudly and I'll use legimency to steal them out of your head. On second thought, skip the distraction—you're an encyclopedia to begin with. Just think loudly."

She snorted. "Didn't study?"

"Nope. But I thought about it. Then decided it would be an awful waste of time that could be spent shagging."

His sex life disgusted her. She'd never slept with Ron, had never slept with Peter, and certainly had no plans to so flippantly reference her sex life when she decided she was ready to have one. "One day, she'll end up pregnant, or you'll have yourself a nice STD, or both, and then you'll wish you'd had a bit more discretion."

He shook his head. "Nah."

She rolled her eyes and carefully made her way up the steps to the building. She was pleasantly pleased when he held the door open for her. They walked down the hall to the transfiguration classroom together. They paused outside the door and turned to each other.

"Last one," he gulped, suddenly serious.

"Last one," she confirmed. She knew, intellectually, that she could do it. Her nerves apparently thought otherwise. "Good luck,"

He held the door open for her again and took the exam booklets from the table by the door.

"Good luck," he whispered into her ear as he stood behind her, and then they went into the classroom and took their respective desks.

_Last one_.

**

* * *

**

"You didn't think loudly enough," Draco told her as he fell in step with her outside the classroom. "Feel like going to Dragon's Demons with us?"

She was pleasantly surprised by the offer, and was happy enough with the exam to feel almost light. She almost accepted on the spot. However, she then came to the realization that she would be horribly out of place bar-hopping with Draco and his friends. She also decided she should help Peter study to atone for her snappish attitude before.

"Thanks, but I can't," she told him as they trudged through the cold to their dorms together. "I'm going to help Peter study."

He snorted. "If Tiffa were anywhere near as doting as you are, we'd be breaking up far less. We'd probably be married and boring by now. Thank Merlin she's nothing like you at all."

She wasn't sure if she was being insulted or complimented but followed him to the boy's floor anyway. She knew his room this year was somewhere on the same floor as Peter's and they made pleasant small talk as they walked.

"Hey, we won't leave for another half an hour. Just come find me if you change your mind," he told her.

"Thanks," she said, still somewhat puzzled by him including her in his plans. She had thought that they were only study partners out of necessity, and that the rest of the time he just liked to annoy her; were they _friends?_ He a confusing man. He might as well be pms-ing. At least _that_ would explain the mood swings.

She knocked on Peter's door as Draco disappeared farther down the hall. "It's unlocked," she heard her boyfriend call out gruffly from behind the thin wooden door.

She found him sprawled out on the floor surrounded by text books and pages of notes. He didn't bother looking up as she made her way to him through the maelstrom. She was careful not to step on anything though she was slightly annoyed that he wouldn't acknowledge her presence.

"Hello," she said awkwardly when she'd found a blank patch of carpet to sit on.

"I don't have time to talk," he snapped without looking at her.

"I know," she said defensively. "I came to help."

He finally looked up at her. She could tell from the angry red lines marring his cool blue eyes that he hadn't slept much in days, maybe weeks. "I don't need your pity-help. You're done with your exams, why are you even still here?"

"To help you!" She said defensively.

"WHY?" He shouted. His eyes smoldered with anger and she was too confused to be afraid of his wrath. "You don't care about me! You're too busy whoring around with that Malfoy git!"

"_Excuse me,_" she retorted bitterly, the "whoring" remark chafing her_. "_What are you talking about?"

"For someone who "hates" Malfoy, you sure spend a lot of time with him!"

"Because he _pesters_ me, not because I like him- most days I barely tolerate him!"

"You had me fooled!"

"Well you're acting like a fool!"

"You know what? Just get out. I don't have time to argue with you right now, not that I want to anyway. Just go away. We'll talk later." And just like that, his anger cooled and he dismissed her.

She stood up, annoyed and shocked. She felt almost as if she'd been slapped. He was never like this. Right? She carefully picked her way back through the melee and made her way swiftly out of the room.

On a passive-aggressive whim, she turned back to him and put her hands on her hips. "And thanks for asking, my exam went really well. Good luck on yours too," she spat and slammed the door behind her.

She began to stomp to the stairs when she heard a door open. She turned, hoping for Peter, but found Draco emerge from down the hall instead. "Oi, Granger," he said as he noticed her. She noted he seemed to greet her that way most of the time and briefly wondered where his creativity had gone. "Problems in paradise?"

He broke up and got back together with his one girlfriend more than most people would do with multiple significant others in their entire lives, but she found herself ashamed of what had happened with Peter. It was a failure, she knew. Either he hadn't been right for her or she'd just been wrong, or the timing was off, and even if their relationship hadn't failed, it was remarkably close. It was shameful to her.

"No," she lied. "He just doesn't need help studying." He saw through the lie, she knew, but seemed to accept it, like he already knew that it was easier for her to deny what had happened that believe it had really occurred.

"Well, he's an idiot," he told her flatly, and she understood what he meant, and that he was actually trying to _console_ her.

"Just stressed," she brushed it off, like it hadn't shaken her as much as it had. "Anyway, does the barhopping offer still stand?"

**

* * *

**

"Hermione, I think you're drunk," Draco told her. Well, one of the Dracos; there were three. Maybe they all three said it at once—that'd be impressively coordinated. She, in contrast, felt very far from impressively coordinated. Impressively _uncoordinated_, maybe.

"Probably," she giggled but reached for her drink anyway.

He pulled the glass away from her and gave her a stern look. "I'm cutting you off. I'm already probably going to have to carry you home as it is."

She tried very unsuccessfully to pry the glass away from him. "Oh, go shag your girlfriend."

He smirked. "I already have. In the bathroom, about half an hour ago."

"You make me sick."

"No, that's the alcohol. I'm going to pay the tab and then take you back to your dorm room."

All three of the Draco's left. Their coordination was making her dizzy. She rested her head on the table and waited to stop feeling nauseous.

He returned and helped her out of her seat and then grabbed Tiffa's hand with his free one and the three made their way out of the pub slowly.

"Granger, can you apparate back to school without splinching yourself?" he asked.

She glared but didn't dignify him with a response and instead apparated successfully. She waited a moment and then heard the familiar pops of apparition as Draco and Tiffa appeared beside her at the school gates. Draco stood between the two women as they made their way through the dark campus, his arm around the drunken one as he half-helped half-carried her to her dorm room and his other held securely in his girlfriend's.

By the time the three got to the girls' dorm, the cold had sobered Hermione considerably. Draco helped her into her room and she fell onto her bed with all the grace of a beached whale. Her limbs felt too disjointed to function properly. She heard him say a quick spell, but it didn't register in her head.

"Take this," he told her, thrusting a vial of an amber liquid at her.

It was difficult, but her clumsy fingers managed to unscrew the cap and she drank it without hesitation but with a great deal of ineptness. Almost immediately the fog began to clear from her mind and the feeling of realizing the clarity of living astounded her.

"Why did you do that?" He asked.

She was confused, but fairly sure it wasn't just because of the alcohol. "Because you gave it to me."

"But you didn't even ask what it was!" She didn't understand why he was being so angry, but was distracted from the enigma that was the man standing in her room by the returning feeling in her appendages. She found it strange that before she had felt light but limp, and now she felt whole and definite. She curled her toes and fingers just because she could.

"I trust you," she said absently, focused on rippling veins in her hand as her fingers moved. The human body was really quite exquisite.

"Why?" He asked in a sudden outburst that captured her attention.

She blinked and looked up at him, her eyes wide. "The same reason you're as lively as you are."

"I fail to see how my acting like a flamboyant theatre freak has anything to do with you trusting me. Unless you have a secret kink or something else I'd rather not know about."

She rolled her eyes and was momentarily shocked to find that she actually _could_. It must have been a sobering potion, and a powerful one at that. She wondered why he hadn't given it to her before having to wrestle her unresponsive body back to the school, but she didn't ask because it wasn't important. She fought the urge to revel in the feeling of regaining her body and instead focused on him, because there was something different about him, and she had a suspicion that whatever happened next would later define their relationship.

"They're related because both things happened due to the war," she explained and sat up slowly to lean against her headboard. She gave a pointed look to the vacated end of the bed and he took the implicit order to sit across from her. He'd never fully appreciated the functionality of a sleigh bed before as he leaned against her footboard.

"The war changed people, you know. It changed everyone. We were just children when it began, but we were forced to make adult decisions and adult sacrifices; we were children in age only.

"We fought on the sides that others picked for us. There was no choice, really, but _you _made a choice anyway, when you refused to let them decide for you. I trust you because you turned your back on that. I trust you because you didn't want to kill Dumbledore, and you couldn't. I trust you because when it counted in the final battle, you fought for the right side.

"I know you couldn't have defied your family. Your father had you knee-deep in that shit from the time you were born; by the time you were old enough to think for yourself, by the time you realized how wrong it was, you had to do it all anyway, because it wasn't just your life at stake and you were twisted and manipulated by cold, sadistic hands. And then, in the final battle, when death was at its closest, you decided to live your life. You weren't just gambling your life away; the strong possibility of death waited for you behind each option, so you chose the right side because you knew that in the end it probably wouldn't matter anyway.

"The war changed everything. With Voldemort and most of the Death Eaters gone, we were free again. The nightmares still haunted us, of course, but we were free from fear. We were larks locked in the cellar, longing for the sky and then suddenly the doors opened and let us out and we discovered the world to be more beautiful than we'd ever hoped to imagine. We still had scars and wounds from the war, but we healed too quickly, too eager to fly, and so the despair still lingered under the surface. We all act so happy and pretend that the wounds don't still sting.

"You're a singing lark, Draco, and that's why you act like a "flamboyant theater freak", as you so eloquently put it. You're not, you know; I think it's mostly just an act, because it puts you in the center of attention, like you're used to, but it also hides all your insecurities. It's why you're here; I used to wonder, but then I realized that you have no idea what you're doing with your life and you're looking for answers about the past, but you won't find them here. And so I trust you because you feel guilty, and you feel _human_, and you're my friend, past all that banter and teasing, and not just because we're the only ones fluent in English in the department—that's just an excuse. We're friends. And so the reason I trust you and the reason you act the way you do are absolutely related."

He couldn't look at her. He wanted to say something snarky about her being so self-assured and cocky about her knowledge. He wanted to tell her she didn't know what she was talking about so he could leave and figure out if she _did_ know what she was talking about. He wasn't used to his psyche being analyzed so meticulously but swiftly, and was mildly horrified that the witch sitting across from him understood him far more than his girlfriend. It made him question his relationship. It made him what to kiss her.

He sat in a stunned ball at the foot of her bed silently. He wanted to dispel the awkwardness of the moment- for surely she felt it too- but didn't know what do say, what to do, was afraid that he would do precisely the wrong thing.

She took the burden from him and changed the topic. "Where's Tiffa?" She asked suddenly. "Didn't she come in from the bar with us?"

He nodded, relieved. "Yeah, she did. She's probably in here room sulking now, though."

"Why?"

"Because I paid more attention to the drunk girl falling down into the snow."

"Who- oh." She looked embarrassed remembering her predicament. Even more mortifying was that she was like the other woman.

But he seemed to read her thoughts and appeased her worries easily. "She gets like this. She's basically a jealous psycho-bitch most of the time. And it's not just people; she gets angry when I focus too much on inanimate objects or studying."

"Quite a catch," Hermione muttered drily.

He rolled his eyes. Usually, he'd defend his girlfriend, but at that moment, he just didn't feel up to it. "Explain to me women's jealousy, Hermione," he said and prepared for another long rant, though hopefully a less awkward one. He should go talk to Tiffa, he knew, but he'd rather be having an intelligent (albeit rather one-sided conversation) with the woman across from him than have another yelling match with his girlfriend.

The look in her eyes told him that she was about to spew out one hell of an impromptu dissertation.

She was.

"Okay, so the important thing to remember is that women are typically insecure. And really, you can't blame them, because you wouldn't feel too great about yourself either if you bloated and bled regularly. Women typically have constantly diminishing self-esteem, because, for the most part, the ego is like a colander, and its easier for men to be self-sufficient in terms of replacing what's lost to the colander. Women, on the other hand, need external support; it's not about the attention so much as it is the validation of worth, and Disney's planted this insane idea that the only true form of validation is having a man at your beck and call, and society as a whole does little to dispel the notion that a woman is incomplete without a Prince Charming.

"So even though validation is perfectly good coming from a friend of either gender, or a parent or teacher, etc, emphasis is put on receiving validation from a significant other. Jealousy, then, arises when the colander empties and is not replenished. Sometimes, it is justifiable, if the empty-colander syndrome was engendered by an incident that would cause one to doubt a partner. However, usually, jealousy is misappropriated low self-esteem.

"Women react to their need for validation when their self-esteem runs low in different ways. This is where the dichotomy comes in handy. Women in the "non-Draco compatible" category will tend to be less clingy and will resort to merely feeling horrid and eating lots of chocolate and wondering what they've done wrong because they tend to be non-confrontational with of course the exception of the freaks. Women in the "Draco-compatible" category, though, will actively seek out attention more often, and so a lack of attention is a cause of alarm. Responses like Tiffa's are common, as you know by now, and it's actually a clever way of being confrontational by being _nonconfrontational_, because the silence obviously garners at least a conversation and apology. The alternative is the direct confrontation, which I'm sure you're also acquainted with, wherein screaming often ensues.

"So, in short, it's not so much that Tiffa is insane as it is that she has a low self-esteem, whether or not she'll admit it, and she needs validation that you aren't giving her by doing other things."

He blinked and gave his mind a moment to catch up with her mouth. She sat patiently to let him process and couldn't help but notice the faint look of horror on his face as he realized how bloody awful it was to be a woman.

"So how do I fix it?" He asked finally.

"Fix what?" She asked back, needing clarification; there was a good deal about the topics discussed in her speech that needed to be fixed, she believed.

"How do I make her not so insecure?" He asked, but it was more of a demand for her to help him than an actual question.

"You lock yourself in a closet with her and live as her personal servant until you die."

"Hermione!" But he was smiling for the first time that night and she decided that she had a great propensity for being funny.

"Okay, okay, I guess you talk to her and let her know that she's always most important, because if you love her, she should be. Tell her not to doubt your love, but tell her she needs to understand that sometimes other people need you more."

He looked at her credulously. "Hermione, have you _met_ Tiffa?"

"Yes!" She cried defensively. That had been perfectly good advice.

"That won't work with her."

"Well, then, you try anyway and hope."

"You're useless," he said, teasing, but then he realized something. "All your lessons about understanding women haven't really done anything, you know. I think I should get a refund. We still fight and break up, it's just not as much fun anymore. "

"Maybe it wasn't ever fun," she whispered. She didn't even pretend to understand his relationship with Tiffa, but she supposed that after all the dysfunctional relationships he'd been in, they were what he was comfortable with. It was like how little girls whose fathers' hit their mothers were more likely to stay in abusive relationships themselves.

He ran a hand through his hair and she knew he was losing himself to recollection. She gave him time to think; he needed it, she knew, and she was generally a fairly patient person.

"I just… I'm sick of these games. It used to be fun, like it was our way of being whimsical, or something, but then it got serious, or I thought it did, and I wanted more and the fights just got annoying," he paused and remembered himself. She may have explained the intricacies of his id and ego, but he didn't want to reveal any more weakness than he had to. He suddenly realized how emotionally exposed to her he was, and he found he didn't like the power balance favoring her. "So, Professor Granger, how do I go about fixing this relationship?"

"Talk to your girlfriend," she told him frankly, not oblivious to his slight change in demeanor.

"And you?" He prompted as he lazily stretched his legs out across her bed. She was suddenly and vividly reminded of the boy he'd been at Hogwarts.

"And I what?"

"You and Petey. You fought, I know, and then you got very, very drunk with me. So how are you going to fix _that_ relationship?"

So he did know. She wasn't as mortified as she'd thought she'd be. It was embarrassing, yes, but painful and confusing more than anything. "I don't know," she admitted honestly. "But after exams we'll talk and set things right."

He glared. "You must be pretty damn proud of your perfect relationship."

"It's not perfect," she said humbly and unwittingly fell right into his trap.

"Then why are you with him? The same reason I'm with Tiffa? Because it's comfortable and he doesn't make you feel anything you're afraid to feel?"

"Hey!" She began, but he cut her off quickly.

"And you know what? Don't you dare fucking think that you can understand what's going on between Tiffa and me. And don't you dare believe you know me because I'm no damn 'lark' or whatever the hell you think—you don't know me! And how dare you judge my relationship when you have a platonic relationship with someone you don't like and only the requisite amount of snogging!"

"What?" She screeched, suddenly defensive and wondering where the hell this was coming from. They'd just been having a perfectly lovely conversation, hadn't they? What had happened?

He stood from her bed with a feline grace and she scrambled up as well. "Have a nice night, Granger," he spat.

"Draco!" She tried to grab his hand but he yanked his arm away with a force that sent her reeling into the wall. She hit her head and it didn't hurt but only added to her annoyance as he stalked out of her room and slammed the door behind him.

She stood alone in the middle of her room, her mind spinning in nauseating circles. She didn't want to think about Draco Malfoy and his problems or Peter and their problems either right now. So she impulsively took a sleeping potion and collapsed onto her bed for the second time that night.

**

* * *

**

When she woke up, someone was knocking insistently at her door. She mumbled incoherently in response as the annoying sound pervaded her dreams. She vaguely registered going through the motions of getting up to answer the door.

"Hi, Hermione," someone said, and she finally opened her bleary eyes enough to appraise the situation. "So, about last night… were you still sleeping?" She nodded, yawned, and wondered what time it was to warrant such shock in his voice. "Oh… would you like me to leave so you can go back to bed?"

"No, it's probably best that I get up now," she murmured and leaned heavily on the doorframe. She yawned again, then remembered he must be there for a reason. "Just let me get dressed, then we can talk about whatever you wanted."

She dressed quickly and carelessly and used a charm to straighten up her bed before letting him back in the room.

They stood and stared at each other awkwardly for a moment before he thought to inquire to her health. "Are you feeling well?" He asked. "You don't usually sleep this late."

She nodded. "I'm fine, thanks, I just didn't sleep much last night."

"That's not like you."

"No." She sighed, wondering when they'd become no better than strangers, and looked at him. "So your exam was today?"

"Yeah!" He said as if suddenly remembering why he had come in the first place. "That's why I came, actually. It went well. I wanted to say thank you for coming over last night to help me study, and apologize for being so short with you."

"It's fine," she said stiffly. "We've all been a been testy lately, if you'll pardon the pun."

He smiled. "Yeah, well, I still shouldn't have snapped at you. You were being kind. So, in apology, would you like to go out to dinner? My treat."

She wanted to say no and crawl back into bed and sleep another 14 hours, but she also felt obligated to say yes and mend things between them. "That sounds lovely. What time?"

"Would an hour be enough time?"

"Yes." It was more than enough, considering she didn't plan on donning more than jeans and a decent shirt. Lipgloss too, if she felt up to it. She had a feeling, though, that she wouldn't, but didn't feel much like sharing that she wouldn't be needing all the time he was giving her. She needed to start packing for Christmas with her parents, anyway. He'd never know the difference.

"I'll pick you up here, then."

"It's a plan," she smiled. He chalked up her lack of enthusiasm to the fact that she had just woken.

**

* * *

**

Fifty-five minutes later, someone knocked on the door again, and Hermione decided that she'd better get dressed.

"Just a minute," she cried. She stepped around her nearly-packed trunk and pulled on jeans and a green shirt, forgoing lip gloss.

She opened the door and glared at the sight of Draco Malfoy. "As much as I'd love to continue to argue with you, I have a date in five minutes."

He smirked and she found herself wanting very much to punch the smirk off his arrogant face. "As much I'd love to continue to argue with you as well, I also have a date in five minutes. My girlfriend talked to your boyfriend into a double date. I've been instructed to take you."

"No."

"No?"

"No. I'm not going anywhere with you."

"I see. So your trust in me…"

"Died about the same time you decided to be an asshole."

"Don't be a bitch."

"Ready to go!?!" Tiffa appeared suddenly, popping out of nowhere like some insane child's toy. She clung to Draco like a fat woman would cling to a box of ho-hos in an empty grocery store, Hermione thought cynically. Said fat woman then proceeded to kiss her boyfriend with more tongue than Hermione had seen in all her years of being a dentists' daughter.

"Hermione's a bit tired," Draco explained sweetly. "We'll give our regrets to Petey."

She glared at him as Tiffa beamed. "What a shame!"

Hermione smiled sweetly at the girl. "Oh, no, Draco coddles me- I'm a bit tired, but it's nothing a good cup of coffee won't rememdy."

"Oh, okay." The disappointment in her voice was so poorly hidden that Hermione had no doubts that she was still being a jealous bitch. She figured, though, that the bitch part was permanent.

**

* * *

**

Peter was waiting for them at the restaurant, a small muggle place a bit of a hike from the university. He kissed Hermione lightly on the cheek when they entered. The two couples chattered aimlessly and let Tiffa dominate the conversation until the waitress arrived. It was very obvious that the whole thing was arranged by Tiffa for some reason or another anyway.

"What can I get you to drink?"

Peter started with a beer, and Draco followed suit. They were going clockwise, and Tiffa was next. "I'll have water," she said. "And Hermione will have water as well, with a nice large coffee. She was up quite late last night."

The waitress left and Peter turned to her. "I thought you said you couldn't sleep," he whispered.

"I couldn't," she swore and squirmed. Was this what Tiffa was playing at? "But I was also out a tad later than usual."

"You usually stay up until almost two?" Tiffa asked. Beneath the saccharine and innocent charade, Hermione saw the malice for what it really was.

"You were up until two?" His voice was both incredulous and slightly angry, and it put her on the defensive. "Doing what?"

"We went out to celebrate," Tiffa supplied happily. "Draco and I and some of the guys."

She looked at Draco to avoid looking at her boyfriend. Draco seemed to be avoiding her, though, and his girlfriend prattled on. "She got a bit smashed, regrettably, but came back in one-piece with a bit of help! Tell me, Hermione, was that the first time you've ever been drunk? You didn't seem to take your liquor well."

She couldn't say anything. She blinked and willed herself to wake up and stop having this twisted nightmare.

"Tiffa, just shut up." Hermione's eyes snapped open to stare at the man across the table from her. Had he really just said that?

"But-"

"I'm sick of your petty jealousy. You want to know why I wanted to study with Hermione instead of you? It's because she's a hell of a lot smarter, and less of a bitch to boot. So stop making up ridiculous lies to try to ruin her relationship and pull her down, because I won't tolerate it."

"Draco-"

"I think I'm done here. If you'd like to argue with me further, feel free to accompany me to my dorm." He stood abruptly. "Goodnight, Peter, Hermione. Sorry to cut our double date short, but given that it was all engineered by a conniving bitch in the first place, I think it's hardly a loss. Happy Christmas."

With that, he spun on his heels and walked away. Hermione was amazed both by his display and the way angry emanated from his walk; walking that angrily took talent.

Tiffa followed after him like a wounded kitten, glaring bitterly at Hermione but holding her tongue. Suddenly Hermione found herself alone with her boyfriend and didn't know quite what to say.

"I'm not exactly sure what he sees in her," she finally admitted.

"_Saw_ may be a more appropriate word, dear," he corrected, and cracked a smile. They laughed together, though hers was more nervous than joyous.

It was then she realized that whatever ice had formed in their relationship had broken, and they were no longer strangers. It was a cold comfort to know that they could recover from their spats better than Draco and Tiffa had.

**

* * *

**

They didn't stay out late. They were both exhausted from exams, and though the awkwardness had fizzled, they still weren't on the best of terms. He walked her to her room and left with a goodnight kiss.

She felt slightly guilty but was not surprised to find Draco Malfoy waiting on her bed.

As he rested leisurely at the end of her bed, it could almost have been the night before. She wanted to ignore him for his behavior then, but felt obligated to thank him first.

"I'm sorry about you and Tiffa," she said softly. "Thank you for saving me at dinner tonight."

He shrugged it off. "Tiffa and I weren't meant to be. I thought she had some amount of substance beneath her bitchy exterior, but it turned out she doesn't. And don't thank me, really, because defending you was only partially a courtesy to you and mostly a way to bring her down."

"Oh." Things were awkward again. She pulled off her boots to be doing something and then took her place opposite him.

"So tell me, Professor Granger, what it means when a woman attempts to push you off a small footbridge."

She fought a laugh and tried to continue with the charade. "Well, Mr. Malfoy, it could mean a variety of things, given the context. Should a woman attempt to push you off a small footbridge because an automobile is about to turn you into roadkill, I would suggest thanking said woman. However, if the circumstances in your situation were as I am led to believe, then her actions mean that she is _almost_ annoyed with you enough to try to kill you."

"That's not a comforting thought, Professor."

"Well, Mr. Malfoy, just be glad that she is not annoyed with you enough to _actually_ try to kill you. I think it's in your best interests to placate her at this point."

"Nah. I have a feeling she won't be staying here long after it's clear we won't be getting back together."

She looked at him carefully. There was no strain in his demeanor and his cold detachment from his former lover was almost believable. She followed the charade her was providing for his sake. "I suppose you're right," she agreed. "She's an heiress, looking for an heir to marry. You're really the only one at the school, and after you, anyone else would be a shoddy replacement and a slap to her ego."

"Why thank you, Professor, I believe that was _almost_ a compliment."

He smiled but she couldn't take it anymore and ended the charade abruptly. "But really, Draco, are you okay? I know that you cared for her," she said, losing the didactic tone altogether.

He scoffed. "Of course I'm fine. She's just some dumb girl."

Some dumb girl that he thought he loved, she thought cynically. He was most definite _not_ fine, and the blatant lie proved it. "Okay, well if you ever need to talk, I'm here."

"Duly noted." She hadn't expected him to swallow his pride enough to thank her, but she knew he was slightly affected by the offer in some way. He would have come and forced her to talk to him anyway, but it was nice for him to know that she wasn't averse to the idea in the first place. "So let's talk about you," he directed, changing the subject. He was sick of talking about his life, and how she understood with more clarity than he did.

"What about me?"

"Things are good with you and Petey now?"

"Yes, thank you."

"You're welcome, again. Really, it was killing two birds with one stone; I got to break things off with Tiffa and save you from her lies all at once."

She flushed with guilt and embarrassment. "They weren't quite lies."

He shrugged off that particular detail. "They weren't quite the truth either, though. She would have put a very bad spin on something very innocuous even though the events would have been the same, and so the whole thing would have very much been a lie. It's all in the connotation."

"That's very wise, Mr. Malfoy," she smiled, slipping back into their comfortable roles.

"I try, professor." He grinned and she found herself smiling just because he seemed happy. "Now, I'm going to go back to my dorm room and sleep for a week or two. Happy Christmas!"

He stood and walked across the room. She followed suit to shut the door behind him and lock it—although that, apparently, was useless. His hand already on the doorknob, he turned suddenly and she found herself standing entirely too close to him.

"Thank you for everything," he breathed suddenly. "For being a good friend and a decent person and never pushing me off a small footbridge."

"You're welcome. You're a rather good friend as well." She hadn't meant to whisper, but she had. She looked up at him and was shocked to find his grey eyes staring intensely down at hers. It made her feel strange, but it a good way, and she didn't move as his head swept lower, his lips melding with her own.

It was a short kiss, but not hasty, and what it lacked in longevity was made up for in quality as every nerve in her body tingled. By the time her mind had caught up and her hands began to reach up so her fingers could run through his hair, it was already over, and he was already pulling away. His forehead rested against hers, his eyes closed, as she caught her breath.

In her haze, the first thing she thought to say was "I have a boyfriend."

He nodded without opening his eyes and the calm contented smile on his face dropped. "I know."

He didn't look at her again before he left.

**

* * *

**

She didn't tell Peter about any of it: that night at the bar, or the kiss the next night. She felt guilty for not feeling worse about kissing him, but found that she couldn't quite make herself regret that kiss. Draco might have been the wrong person, and it might have happened at the wrong time, but his kiss was pure and good and soul-shattering and she thought of it with a fond detachment.

After the holiday break, she didn't seek him out. He didn't seek her out either, though. They became strangers again, though this time they were strangers who knew entirely too much about one another. Every time she saw his retreating blond head down a corridor or in the commons, she felt simultaneous urges to run after him and run away.

They stopped studying together. He stopped popping up at inconvenient times, demanding her to help him understand the intricacies of women. He stopped being such a "flamboyant theatre freak", and she noticed, despite not speaking to him.

Tiffa's absence was also an egregious change. She didn't return after the winter holidays, and from the bits of gossip Hermione heard in the girls' loo, the vile heiress had moved to Paris with a new lover. Hermione couldn't say she was surprised, but was concerned for Draco; she knew he wasn't the stotan he portrayed. He wasn't exactly fragile, but he was breakable; he was human/

But he didn't appear randomly to talk about his feelings, and she didn't ask. It was like her implicit 'don't ask, don't tell' policy with Peter. She found herself hating the web of half-truths and manipulations she was caught in, but she didn't struggle against the restraints.

She ticked off the days on her calendar and noted the diminishing number of days she had left at the school. She still harbored a deep love for learning, but would be glad to leave the place. She'd go back to London and reconnect with Ron and Harry and everyone else, then get a good job with the ministry, or maybe even become a Potions Master at an independent apothecary or develop new cures for St. Mungo's. She'd have her own flat, or maybe a small house with her own potion's lab, and eventually she'd marry someone- Peter, or maybe someone else- and have a few children and then retire into a predictable, monotonous life.

She thought about her future. Sure, she _wanted_ husband and children, but it was that damn predictability that irked her, and she didn't even know why; she liked her routines well enough. She supposed she had idealistically dreamed that Merlin University would open her up to new, exciting options instead of leading her straight back to the path she'd been on after Hogwarts. She'd been with Ron then, and she loathed admitting it was a bit like being with Peter now. She couldn't imagine herself staying friends with Peter, though; she enjoyed being with him at present, but he seemed almost too forgettable. He'd be going to America after graduation, having already accepted a job offer in New York contingent on his graduation, and she had no doubts that she'd been staying in England, and they both seemed to know already that they wouldn't be doing long-distance.

She'd stopped wondering why she was with him, though. She had long since come to terms with the great ironies of her life, that she sought stability but balked at the thought of predictability, despite the fact that the two were very closely tied. Analyzing herself made her skin itch and she just wanted to step out of her body for a few minutes and cease being constrained by her own self. Everyone she knew had an image of who Hermione Granger was, and Hermione Granger found that she couldn't quite shrink into the mold of herself.

She nearly talked to Draco a grand total of three times after winter break. Once, she'd been sick of studying for Potions alone, and had searched the library, knowing that he had the same essay due the next day, before she realized that he had class and might actually be attending it. Afterwards she felt so pathetic for having his schedule memorized and forwanting his help that she had promptly un-swallowed her pride and went back to studying alone determinedly.

The next time, she'd just snogged Peter in his dorm room for nearly half an hour before she pushed his wandering hands away and said goodbye. He wanted to go farther, she knew, just as Ron had, but it didn't feel right to her, so she stopped him every time. It was strange and frustrating to her that she could kiss her boyfriend for thirty minutes and not once feel the elated energy that had zinged through her after kissing Draco for not even thirty _seconds_. She had just gone off to find and indubitably fight with him when she stepped outside into the rain. The cold water curtailed her anger and ardor and she found herself wondering why people were so enchanted with the idea of kissing in the rain; it was pretty damn miserable to her.

The last time she nearly talked to him hadn't been as climatic. She'd been on her way to class when he passed in the hall. She'd looked at him and stopped walking. She was going to say something- anything- and had opened her mouth, suddenly desperate to talk to him, when the bell rang. She was late for class. She turned reflexively and walked away, and he did the same.

She didn't see even a glimpse of him for another month. The snow had melted and the flowers had begun to venture out, seeking the sun with shy buds and petals, and she found herself missing him. She hadn't thought it was possible that she would ever miss Draco Malfoy, but she did, and as more than a study partner from convenience; she missed him as a friend. With him, it seemed her skin stretched a little looser, that the mold was less rigid, because Draco Malfoy very simply did not care who Hermione Granger was.

She stopped considering seeking him out when Tiffa returned.

**

* * *

**

If she'd paid attention to the outside world instead of completely throwing herself into her studies, she would have realized that their relationship was once again one-sided, but this time, in reverse, with Tiffa needing Malfoy much more than he needed her. But she did focus soley on her studies, and so she never saw him push her away and refuse her touch, and never heard him call her a selfish bitch. All she knew was that Tiffa was making herself very known around the campus, and Hermione resented the blonde prat with a vengeance. She chalked it up to hating the girl for the way she'd treated Malfoy.

It had nothing to do with jealousy.

**

* * *

**

Hermione saw Tiffa quite frequently, and she supposed Tiffa meant for it to be that way. The vindictive blond slut had only been back on campus a week before Hermione was ready to wring her scrawny neck just to end the incessant whining that pervaded her thoughts. No matter where she was—in the library studying; in her room, sleeping—it seemed Tiffa was not quite out of earshot. It was exasperating.

Class became a solace more than ever before, as it was the one place she never saw the bitch. Tiffa couldn't get in a class she wasn't enrolled in, and moreover, her incessant chatter would not have been tolerated by any professor. And so Hermione battered the registrar into letting her enroll in a class she did not need to take just to escape the blonde bimbo.

After one remarkably Tiffa-free Saturday, two weeks after the reappearance of the bitch, Hermione happily bounced from the library to Peter's dorm room. Their last set of exams _ever_ was coming up in a few weeks, and so they'd begun to study, but the day was so perfect and her mood so good that she decided to persuade him to go out with her. They'd get ice cream, perhaps, or go to the park. Normal things. Happy things.

Hermione all but skipped to his dorm. He'd most likely be there, she knew, because he wasn't at the library and no one had class on Saturday. And if he wasn't there, she could always go on a walk through the gardens alone…

She made her way up to his floor leisurely. She heard loud, angsty music from the vicinity of Draco's room, but ignored it. His ignoring her had made it painfully obvious that she was not welcome. The fact that she had also ignored him was irrelevant. He was probably in there screwing Tiffa senseless, she decided, and using the music to cover it. She could even detect the faintest hint of that odious giggle beneath the heavy music.

She kept going down the hall to Peter's and the giggling grew louder. She supposed they couldn't have gotten to shagging yet, or he'd be too preoccupied to fiddle with the volume; he'd be fiddling with _other_ things. The thought made her sick.

She didn't bother knocking before opening her boyfriend's door. The worst that had ever happened was that she walked in on him once when he was only wearing a towel.

That day, though, he was wearing even less, and Tiffa was wearing only slightly more. Hermione stared at them for a good five seconds as they continued to do, well, _it_, before she shut the door unnoticed and walked away.

Her eyes were wide. She felt Fred and George had just dumped a bucket of ice water on her in a cruel prank. She started walking slowly, to escape that giggle and the groans that were beginning to emanate from the room, and then picked up speed, eager to escape the place altogether. By the time she was back at the main stairwell, she was running.

She made it across campus before she began to cry, and made to the park in the village before breaking down completely. She sat on the bench, her head in her hands as she bent over and tried to make the world feel like it wasn't spinning anymore.

It didn't even make sense, she thought bitterly as she sobbed. She didn't love him, and she'd known he didn't love her. She'd been expecting to break it off eventually anyway, despite how momentarily nice it was. She had no real expectations of him; it didn't make _sense_ that she felt so betrayed.

But then she got dizzy and the thoughts swirling through her head receded as she concentrated on merely breathing, existing. She sat there, counting her breaths as the tears subsided, until she was almost normal again. She almost felt like Humpty Dumpty, falling and splattering irrevocably into a gooey mess that no one could put back together again.

"You don't cry very well."

She turned to see Draco Malfoy, and was filled with an overwhelming urge to punch him. What kind of human being said something so insensitive after watching someone cry? He was an asshole, she decided emphatically, a complete asshole.

Except then he slid his jacket off and wrapped it around her shoulders and she was forced to doubt that. "It'll get better, you know, whatever happened. Girls like you have breaking points; you're like a really big dam, and eventually, the dam always spills over eventually. You don't cry much, and when you do, you let it all go. So it's okay, really, because half the things you're crying about don't even matter anymore."

And then she started crying again because she missed him and it felt so right and yet so damn strange for him to randomly pop up on a park bench to comfort her. This time, he moved closer and wrapped an arm around her shoulder.

"Hermione, it'll be alright," he promised.

She believed him.

* * *

He led her back to the campus and to her dorm room. They didn't say much, but it was enough. They'd both missed dinner, but she wasn't hungry and he wasn't complaining. They assumed their positions on her bed without speaking, and he handed her chocolate frogs that appeared from almost nowhere. She supposed he was believed chocolate made everything better for women, and she had to admit that he wasn't all wrong.

"That was incredibly insightful," she told him finally. "What you said at the park. You don't happen to have another professor, do you?" She wanted to keep the mood light. Eventually, she'd have to tell him about the infidelity, and she knew he'd be kind, but she still didn't want to talk about it until she absolutely had to.; it was still too raw, too fresh, too un-analyzed.

He smiled, glad she was back up for their typical banter. "Oh no, only you," he assured her.

"Good," she smiled. The nearly content look in her eye suddenly shifted, though, and he knew she was thinking about something. "The student should become the teacher, then; help me understand men."

He swallowed and thought a moment. "Alright, but you may want to write this down so you remember everything."

"Okay," she nodded dutifully and summoned some parchment and a quill. "I'm ready when you are."

"Alright, there's a lot to say on the subject, really, because men are complex and diverse creatures, but the key, essential, and number one fact you need to know about men that basically sums up the nature of the species is this" he paused for dramatic flourish and she held her quill, caught in the simulated suspense. "Men want sex."

The quill was promptly thrown at his head. "It's true!" He protested as he laughed.

"I thought you were being _serious!_" She reprimanded.

"I was!"

"That is _not_ true; even I know that much."

"Well, Mrs Prim-and-Proper, many adult relationships include sex. That much you cannot deny."

"Well yes, they _include _it, but it's not the most important thing!"

He rolled his eyes and she threw her pillow at him. "Why did you avoid me?" She asked suddenly, after he'd spat a few stray feathers from his mouth.

"You avoided me."

"Yes, but"

"But what?" He said, suddenly hostile. Hypocrisy was one of the few things that truly irked him. "We kissed. You very subtly reminded me that you were already taken. We didn't speak again. End of story."

"I wanted to," she whispered.

And then his anger melted away and he smiled sadly. "I wanted to, too."

"I'm sorry."

"Me too."

"We're rather like schoolgirls."

"But without the skirts."

She smiled, and he smiled, and it was almost exactly how things had been that night, months ago, before everything had changed. "Really, Draco? Because I can imagine you'd look quite dashing in a black leather mini."

**

* * *

**

When she broke up with Peter the next day, she was calm and collected. She appeared at his door bright and early with a box of the things he'd left with her accidentally, lent her, and given her during their time together and waited patiently while he scrambled to give her back her things as well, though his constant stopping to beg for her back made the experience even more painful for her.

Draco stood beside her as they waited, and then took her to lunch. He noticed the bags beneath her eyes but didn't say anything. She noticed Tiffa's egregious absence but didn't say anything. That was in the past, and she had more imminent concerns.

"We graduate soon," he remarked suddenly, as they waited for their coffee.

"Few short weeks," she concurred. She looked across the table at him and realized all at once that he wasn't forgettable in the slightest. Not the way his arrogant lips smirked, not the way his pratty hair was always perfectly coiffed, not the way he didn't care that she cried and got upset and did petty things because she was human before she was Hermione Granger.

"Are you going back to London?" He asked.

"No," she said resolutely, before her mind caught up with her lips, and her answer shocked her. It shocked him as well, apparently, judging from his eyebrows, raised in surprise.

"Oh?"

"I… I'm not sure, exactly."

"That makes two of us."

Later, she would claim that she was exhausted into insanity. At the moment, though, her actions were very firm as she reached across the table and kissed him, relishing in the feeling that made every nerve in her body tingle.

The table dug into her hip, and she finally sat back down and looked at him, waiting for a reaction. "So, do you have a boyfriend?" He prompted, obviously teasing her for her response to their first kiss.

She smiled. "Yes, I suppose I do."

His smile faltered, and then he realized what she meant and smiled back. "Yes, I suppose you do."

**

* * *

**

Peter became what Draco had been, an outcast in her life. Unlike Draco, though, he didn't dwell at the back of her mind and instead completely fell out of her orbit as if suddenly released by gravity. Seeing him at the graduation ceremony had been something of a shock; she almost couldn't believe she'd dated that boy as long as she had.

Tiffa moved to Russia unexpectedly with a widower just over 40 years her senior. She had step-grandchildren older than she was, but Hermione supposed that that was what it meant to be an heiress. Of course, Tiffa didn't graduate, but Hermione suspected she'd never really planned to in the first place, and that she'd only returned because she wanted Draco back after her Parisian lover moved on to someone else. From what Hermione had gathered, sleeping with Peter was her way of getting back at Hermione, but what the slut had failed to realize that it would ultimately push the other girl together with the man she sought to keep away from her. It had also been hinted at, but never confirmed, that Draco also had a hand in her sudden disappearance, though he evaded giving direct answers to his curious girlfriend's questions.

Hermione, of course, had gained back her study partner, and her friend, with interest. They'd spent hours in the library and their rooms studying for their last final exams _ever_, and, admittedly, had spent some of that time _not_ studying. By the time graduation rolled around, she'd almost begun to reconsider her stance against sex outside of marriage. _Almost_. They hadn't been together long, but she understood him better than anyone else, and he accepted her more than anyone else, and the emotional attachment formed between the two transcended anything she'd ever felt with anyone.

"So," he said as they walked hand in hand through the campus on their last night at the school.

"So…" she continued.

"That was your cue to say something to fill the silence," he informed her.

"You know, silence isn't always a bad thing."

"Really?" He challenged. "Because usually when we aren't speaking, I've done something 'wrong', or you're in one of your 'moods'."

She prodded his ribs. "Well, right now we aren't decisively not speaking to one another, we're just not speaking because it's very pleasant to just be together."

"Is this like how women always go to the bathroom together?"

She rolled her eyes. "I fail to see the connection."

"I mean, is it just one of those strange womanly things I'm going to have to accept but never understand?"

She smiled and leaned into him. "Yes."

He kissed the top of her head in an absent gesture, like it'd been done a thousand time and would be done a thousand more. "One more question."

"Shoot."

"Are you a slut, heiress, or a gold-digger?"

She laughed, recalling her words to him all those months ago. "None of the above- I was wrong, at least about you." She smiled, remembering their nearly destructive lessons. "So, do you understand women?" She teased.

He snorted. "Of course not. But I understand you, and that's enough."

**

* * *

**

Sorry for the delay, but I lost the most important three pages of this because I improperly saved the document, and then rewriting was a bitch, plus it ended up as much more of a beast than I anticipated, and then life happened and I may have accidentally killed the frog I was supposed to be feeding for my neighbors. In any case, the frog is dead and currently residing in a plastic bag in their freezer.

So I was thinking and I think a challenge is in order: I challenge you to challenge me. Your challenge could be a list of requirements for a one-short or a line to incorporate. Anything goes as long as it's not Rated-M and submitted via review because that's less confusing to me than private messaging. I may pick your challenge. I may not. Don don don.

I like reviews more than coffee (and the slight food motif returns with a vengeance).


	11. Strength

Happy (fake) birthday, Kaleesha!!!!! May James Phelps sexually assault you. Failing that, you have a Dean you can make out with! And eventually, you know, I'll stop broadcasting details of your life to the rest of the internet!

I almost regret writing this. We'll see...

* * *

**_Strength_**

The first time they came for him, he was in the living room. He was sitting on the couch, watching an insipid muggle children's movie almost against his will, with his daughter sitting in his lap while his son was sprawled across the other half of the couch. His wife was sitting on his other side, her head on his shoulder. They'd been together, the four of them, a family, and a happy one at that.

Harry was the first one there. He apparated directly into the foyer, but the slight pop was missed amid the obnoxious singing on the telly. It wasn't until Harry had grabbed the remote and clicked the blasted thing off that they realized they were not alone.

"Look, stay calm," Harry ordered quickly as he took their wands from the side table. "And I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry."

And then they were surrounded by popping sounds. She squeezed his hand until the knuckles turned white as aurors filled the room. She didn't speak, just stared at Harry, pleading him to make it not true. She didn't need to ask questions; she knew what was happening.

The fact that she knew didn't make it any easier when Harry's boss, a chubby prat named Rune Bzowski, began speaking. "Draco Malfoy, you are hereby placed under Ministry custody for questioning."

"I see," Draco replied stiffly. He wrenched his hand from his wife's, lifted Rose from his lap and handed her to Hermione. "Be good for mummy," he murmured as she squirmed. He stood gracefully and stared at the shorter man before him.

To his credit, Bzowski looked positively flummoxed. He'd been expecting a struggle, hence the number of aurors that accompanied him, but Malfoy's submission caught him off guard. He felt guilty, almost. "Right, then. Weasley, Finnegan, please accompany Mr. Malfoy to the questioning chambers."

As the aurors descended upon him, he turned abruptly and they drew their wands, anticipating a sudden struggle. He didn't struggle, though, just looked at his wife almost passively and said goodbye. They'd disaparated with him in the next moment.

She sat, shocked, on the couch, her daughter stunned in her lap, her son barely moving next to her.

"Mrs. Granger, you will also be detained for questioning," Bzowski informed her, his tone noticeably less cold.

"Mrs. Malfoy," she corrected with a glare. They'd discussed this before, the possibility that maybe she'd be taken too, but she was the brains of the Golden Trio; she was supposed to untouchable. "I'll have to request, then, half an hour to pack the children's things and take them to my mother's."

"Your children will be placed in the Ministry's custody," Bzowski told her.

She didn't bother to conceal her outrage. "You will _not_ take my children back to that godforsaken orphanage," Hermione retorted quickly.

Bzowski sighed and almost looked human. "No. They've been assigned to a host family for the time being. And some of the aurors have volunteered to stay and pack their things."

She looked the squat man in the eye and was revolted. He knew her husband had done nothing wrong but been born into the wrong family. He knew she had done nothing wrong, either, but he was desperate and didn't care who he hurt in the process of finding answers and saving face.

"I don't suppose you will tell me who will be taking care of my children."

"No."

"Very, well, then. If anything happens to them I'll hold you personally responsible." Hermione stood slowly and then turned to kneel in front of her horrified children. "Rose, Scorpius, please be on your very best behavior. Mummy and daddy will be back soon. Remember that we love you." She kissed them both on the forehead and then stood again.

"Potter, Clancy, please accompany Mrs. Malfoy to the questioning chambers."

She vaguely registered Harry taking her elbow as she looked at her petrified children still sitting on the couch, and then they were gone.

* * *

When they landed, they were in a dimly lit reception room. "They'll be fine," Harry reassured her as he pulled her down the corridor. "**I **promise. **I **don't know where they're going, but **I **know they'll be well looked-after. And you won't lose your job, either; **I **made sure of that. Everything will be fine, **I **promise. But **I'm **sorry, Hermione." The words were a rushed whisper as the three quickly made their way to a stone staircase. The other auror said nothing, and obviously missed the tone of Harry's speech, stilted by the forced emphasis on 'I', and the hidden meaning behind the inflection; Harry was all but telling her that her children would be with him.

They would like it at Grimmauld Place, she thought. Lily and Rose got along well, and Albus and Scorpius were becoming friends also, which worked to the advantage of James, who was finally left alone. They'd have fun and be safe under Ginny's watchful, loving eyes, she knew. Harry must have gone through great lengths to make sure he got the children.

"Thank you," she whispered.

They led her up the stairs and into a small dull room. Harry left her with a wizard she didn't know with one last glance, he, too, was gone.

They ran diagnostic tests on her. Though they didn't say so, she knew they were searching for signs that she had been forced to marry him. It was an insult to her and she made sure they knew it. All they found was the recovering damage from Bellatrix Lestranger's torture. The reason she hadn't been able to bear her own children. The reason they'd adopted war orphans. She'd mentioned both facts.

They asked her about her husband. She told them the truth, that he'd blocked another damaging curse from his deranged aunt's wand during the last battle, and that when she'd found him again, lying half dead in the muddy field, she'd saved his life in return. He hadn't spoken to another one of his former compatriots since.

To her knowledge, they added smarmily.

She glared and told them that they didn't keep secrets.

They didn't seem to believe her.

She didn't know how long they kept her there. She wasn't in Azkaban, but was kept in a small cell a floor below the room they took her to question her. The room was dreary and housed only the shelf with the clothes they gave her and a small bed with rough sheets and a thin, garishly colored blanket. She was allowed to use the bathroom three times a day, and to shower every other day. Meals were brought to her room and were all about the same color and consistency, though substantial enough. There were no windows in any of the rooms they let her go in, and she quickly lost track of time. She supposed that was probably the point.

Sometimes, Harry or Ron would escort her from her cell to the questioning room. They were trying, she knew, trying desperately. Usually, though, it was someone else. People who would look at her condescendingly. She knew what they all thought, and she hated them for it.

* * *

They kept questioning her. They were talking in dull circles, swirling around and around until she could barely keep her thoughts straight. It took her a few days to realize what was happening, and then that dull, constant ache in her gut was replaced with a smoldering fire. Being passive and polite until the others grew weary had been their plan, she knew, but screw the plan, because the plan was crap and wasn't getting her anywhere.

She assessed her surroundings and realized _their _plan. The whole damn wing had been built with a single purpose, to wear down the souls of those in question. They wouldn't have to use truth serum, or torture, if they could confuse the inmates. The thought incensed her.

The next day, when they came for her, she had been sitting vigilantly on her bed, counting the ways she could tell Rune Bzowski where to shove it. She had been ready. She'd made her bed for the first time in days, and made an effort with her appearance, running her fingers through her unruly hair and putting on her cleanest jumpsuit.

"Shall we go, then?" She snapped at her guards. No Harry or Ron, today.

The walked her upstairs and she looked at the dismal surrondings bitterly. The whole damn place had been designed to wear her down. She was about to let them know that Hermione Malfoy was not going to be worn down with dismal corridors or juvenile mind games. She repeated the mantra in her head and felt her fury ripen. Tricked into complacency indeed.

She sat sharply on the seat they provided for her. The same man from the first day was sitting across the table from her this time. "Give me the damn truth serum," she ordered.

He looked mildly confused. "What?"

"I'm sick of these pointless games. You want to talk in circles to get the truth, and I just want out of here so I can have my husband and children back. Give me the damn truth serum and we'll get this over with."

"Mrs. Granger, you have the right to be interrogated without the serum," he began. "Under Wizarding Law-"

"I don't care about my freakin' rights. Give me the serum. You'll find that these past days have been a waste of both your time and my time, that I've been telling the truth all along. And when you're thoroughly satisfied, I would very much like a written apology from the Ministry after my children and husband are returned to me."

"Alright, then." He nodded at the auror who had brought her in. He left swiftly, leaving them alone. She stared at him icily until the auror returned with the serum. She swallowed it in one gulp.

They questioned her again, asking her the same things as before. This time, though, they had no choice but to believe her.

They kept her one more night, claiming it was protocol and that others had to review the results. It was bullshit, she knew. They were simply astonished and couldn't believe they'd made such a mistake. They thought there had to be something they'd missed, something they'd overlooked. But there wasn't.

They sent Harry to release her the next morning.

* * *

She stayed with the children at Grimmauld Place. She didn't want to go back to their home without him, so Ginny went to collect her things for her.

She learned she'd been gone for ten days. Rose and Scorpius had stayed with Harry, true to his word, and had been well looked-after. Nonetheless, they were quieter when she returned, and clingier. They slept in her bed and cried in their sleep, begging to have their mummy and daddy back. She soothed them, then cried in the wee hours of the morning in the bathroom alone when she thought no one could hear her.

Harry did his best to comfort her. He told her it was going to be okay, that the Ministry was turning to the same old suspects after the lastest rogue Death Eater spree, and that though Malfoy had served his sentence in Azkaban for the first attack on Hogwarts, and had been found not guilty in a number of other causes, he still elicited suspicion from the Ministry. They were desperate, he told her, for answers. He apologized for them and did what we could, but even as the Chosen One, his power in the Ministry was limited.

"The old, pompous coots will retire one day," he promised. "Then, it'll be us in charge. Everything will be better then, better than it was when the Ministry was overhauled after the war. But you have to admit that this one is better; at least it acts on potential threats."

She'd reluctantly agreed on that point, but it didn't slake her anger any. She wanted her husband back.

* * *

The first time he came back, he'd been gone for nearly three weeks. They was no warning before he fell out of the hearth in the Potter's sitting room, looking altogether ashy and grey, but very much alive. Hermione was out of her reading chair and in his arms in an instant. Whispering desperate declarations of love in his ear as she squeezed his thin form as if afraid he'd disappear. He'd let go her only long enough to pick up one child in each arm, then she'd embraced the three of them, and they stood in the Potter's sitting room in a sobbing, happy, heap until Ginny had come to investigate the ruckus.

They went home that night, after a cheerful and slightly relieved sendoff from the Potters. She cooked for him in the first time in nearly a month, and though she had never been a fantastic cook in the least, he finished off the stew nearly by himself. He swore it was the best meal he'd ever had.

That night, she undressed him and threw his filthy grey uniform away before scrubbing the dirt and sweat and grime from his skin while the children watched their favorite program in the other room. She noticed how pale his skin had become, and how his ribs protruded painfully. She realized that it was entirely possibly he hadn't been fed as well as she had been, nor had been allowed to bathe as regularly. Judging by the dark circles around his tired eyes, he hadn't been allowed as much rest either.

"It was better than Azkaban, love," he murmured, catching her horrified look at the pale skin sticking to his bones.

She hated the Ministry more, then.

That night, they slept in their bed for the first time since before he had been taken away. They hadn't mustered the cruel strength to banish the children to their own beds, and so slept in a tangle of flailing arms and legs.

That was the first night they didn't cry out in their sleep.

* * *

The second time they came for him, he'd been in the backyard, teaching Rose and Scorpius how to fly broomsticks, which only added to their mother's nausea as she watched from the porch. Once again, Harry was the first one there.

"Just like last time," he said frantically. "Be calm. It'll be fine. I'm so sorry."

Hermione squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, it was over, and the aurors had invaded. She quietly handed Harry her wand, as well as Draco's from the table, and she watched through the crowd of people as Draco pulled Rose off her broom and then dropped the broom to the ground. The little girl clung this time, though, and he was struggling to put her down when Hermione waddled through the aurors to her family.

"Rosie, daddy has to go with the nice men now," Hermione said gently as she pried her daughter from her husband's legs.

"NO!" The little girl wailed and she kicked wildly. Her foot caught her mother in the stomach, and Hermione doubled over in pain.

"Hermione!" Draco wrapped his arms around his wife, only to be pulled away by some nameless auror.

"No contact," he snapped over Rose's wailing. No sooner had his hand wrapped around Draco's elbow than Rose attacked him.

"Don't touch my daddy!" She screamed as she bit his leg. "You can't take him away again!"

Taking cues from his older sister, Scorpius began to scream as well, and punched the nearest auror in the shins only to be swept up in foreign arms as he struggled.

"Don't touch him!" Hermione snapped as she pulled her son out of the older man's arms before picking up her daughter, who had quickly be reduced to a sobbing mess on the ground, punching the ground and screaming in a true temper tantrum.

She held both writhing children tightly and watched as Bzowski called on Finnegan and Weasley to take her husband away again. She watched helplessly as he disappeared, then handed her still-squirming children to Harry before marching up to Bzowski.

"I apologize for my children," she stated meaninglessly. "This time, I'd like to skip all the pleasantries of formal interrogation and go right to the truth serum, please, so that I may return to them before serious emotional damage is inflected again."

He shook his head and almost looked ashamed. "That won't be necessary, Mrs. Granger."

"Mrs. Malfoy," she corrected pointedly.

"Of course," he muttered coldly. It was very good could he wasn't Severus Snape, for if he had the man's power to read the unprotected mind, he would have been forced to arrest Hermione for blatant insubordination for telling him exactly what sort of loathsome creature he was. "Though I could dispatch an auror to accompany you to St. Mungo's if you'd like to check on your… delicate condition."

"I'm fine," she retorted coolly. A seven year old's kick to the stomach wouldn't kill the baby, she knew, especially with the prenatal protective potions she'd been taking. She turned away from the man to face her friend. "Harry, I assume we're still welcome at Grimmauld Place?" Hermione asked. She refused to live in their home without him, and she grimly acknowledged the fact that staying with Harry was a political move highly in her favor; no better way to be spied on by an auror than to have it be a friend, and it reinforced the fact that she was loyal to him, and by extension, the entire anti-Voldemort force. Even in death, the evil man managed to tear the wizarding world apart.

He nodded. "Of course."

"I'll see you at dinner, then. Have fun interrogating my husband," she shot bitterly as she marched with her children to the door. She slammed it shut behind her, leaving a team of aurors in her backyard.

* * *

They'd been expecting it that time, at least. They'd packed bags for the children and hidden them in the front closet for Harry, not wanting to be caught unaware again but also not wanting to seem as if they were planning to escape.

They didn't plan to escape. They could have, they knew, after the first time, but they hadn't because they were innocent and wouldn't let the Ministry's prejudice force them to flee, nevermind the logistics of raising two children on the run and giving birth without medical attention. And so they had waited for the team of aurors to swoop in again and violate the sanctuary of their home.

It had been two days since the massive attack on Hogsmeade. The Prophet had reported that two, maybe three, uncaptured Death Eaters had invaded, conjured the dark mark in the sky, and shot of a number of curses to crush building and kill resistors before the aurors arrived and the Death Eaters had disappeared.

Security had doubled on Azkaban, they'd read. Teams of aurors were being stationed at popular wizarding spots all over the country, and they'd waited for the aurors to come back and question them. The part that made them both laugh bitterly with irony was that they'd been with Harry Potter at the time of the attacks, as the Potters had come over for dinner before Harry had been summoned to work suddenly on that fateful Friday night.

* * *

"Eat something, Hermione," Ginny urged. "The prenatal potions will go down easier if you do, you know."

Hermione nodded listlessly. "I know. I'm not really hungry, though." She dropped the fork she'd been fiddling with. It was late, but she'd only just got back from work in time to tuck the children into bed. Ginny had heated up leftovers for her friend, and they both waited for their husbands to come home.

"It's not good for the baby," Ginny told her. She'd been saying the same thing at every meal for two weeks.

"They ruined everything," Hermione retorted bitterly, without adequate transition. "Everything was so perfect before the damn attack. Conceiving this baby was a miracle, you know, and we were so happy, and we'd finally convinced Rose that we would still love her and keep her forever even when we had our own baby because the children in that awful orpahage told her all sorts of terrible lies, and Scorpius was finally accepting that he'd be an older brother and that he couldn't just send the baby away, and Draco was so perfect, and so attentive and doting, and it was like this baby was going to fix all the problems from the first time they took him away, and we were finally going to be a better, stronger, family and move on, and then it happened again, and I can't do this alone, Ginny, not without him…"

Hermione dissolved into tears and Ginny took her cold hand. "You're not going to be alone, Hermione. He didn't do anything wrong. He doesn't know anything. The Ministry will realize that soon enough, and he'll be back. Now eat your casserole before I hex you."

* * *

When they took him the second time, she'd been nearly seven months pregnant. That was a little over a month ago. Her belly had continued to grow to unfathomable dimensions, and she missed everything about him, from the way he happily satisfied her insane food cravings to the way he told her she was beautiful as she struggled to put on her socks. Being pregnant without him was horrible, she thought, and delivering the baby without him would be impossible.

So she stepped out of Grimmauld Place one morning and walked to the horrible little phone booth that took her to the ministry. She'd marched, to the best of her ability, to Rune Bzowski's office, and not-so-patiently waiting outside while his receptionist scuttled in to inform him that Hermione Granger had come to see him.

"Malfoy," she'd corrected the blonde tart as she strode into the office.

"Bzowski," she nodded in a cold greeting.

"Mrs. Granger," he retorted.

"Malfoy," she corrected again with a pointed glare.

"Of course. What brings you here today?"

But he already knew. "My due date is in exactly 28 days," she informed him. "I'd very much appreciate it if you released my innocent husband in time for him to see the birth of our child."

"Duly noted," he muttered dryly.

She paused to glare at him again. "Bzowski, do you recall that I told you I would hold you personally responsible if anything happened to my children?" He nodded, and she continued. "That goes for this child too," she told him. "Should I go into labor without my husband, I expect you to hold my hand as I scream in agony."

"I highly doubt that will happen."

"Good," she smirked, reading her own meaning into his words. "Have a nice day, sir," she muttered, sarcasm oozing from the words.

She marched out of his office with all the dignity a fat woman could muster.

* * *

At Grimmauld Place that night, Harry greeted her with a sly smile. "Heard you spoke to my boss today," he remarked.

She nodded. "Bastard should know what kind of pregnant woman he's dealing with."

Harry nodded and kissed his wife. "Pregnant women are a force to be reckoned with, for sure," he said, and Ginny gave him a playful swat on the arm. Hermione looked away, their affection a painful reminder of what she had lost, when Harry continued. "Anyway, there's talk that they're preparing to release some of the prisoners. He wasn't the only one they took in for questioning, you know, and he's innocent; it's only a matter of time."

Hermione hugged him as best her fat stomach would let her. "Thanks, Harry," she murmured and then made her way upstairs to take a nap after promising Ginny she'd eat something later.

* * *

The second time he came home, he'd been gone for months. The Ministry had been through two rounds of releases already, and she'd waiting in the reception room both times, shoulder to shoulder with other wives looking equally dejected but hopeful. It'd been publicized; too many people had been affected for it not to be.

Harry had gone with her the first time, and Ron the second. Even as aurors, they didn't know how would come through those doors before anyone else. And so they'd taken her back to Grimmauld Place where Ginny consoled her and she consoled her children.

The third time, it had taken her nearly half an hour just to put on her socks, and she'd been through two sobbing fits just to get downstairs so Ginny could take her to the Ministry.

There were less people waiting with her in that damn room this time, and it was less publicized because no one cared anymore. But she did. And she managed to stand on her toes despite her swollen ankles and watch to see who was coming through the door and she willed her tears back into her eyes, because she didn't want the first time he saw her in months to be marred by her looking ugly _and _fat. She wanted to be strong for him.

He wasn't the first one out, but she kept watching for his blond head. She'd never been particularly religious, but she prayed to every higher deity imaginable that he would come back to her, that they would _let _him come back to her.

She almost hadn't recognized him. His pale skin was sallow and dirty, and the green vein of his arms stood out with horrible sickly contrast. His hair was greasy and grey with dirt, far from its normal coiffed state, and he looked altogether _defeated_. So from the Draco Malfoy she'd known.

She hated the Ministry for it.

She ran in all her pregnant glory to meet him. The force of their embrace nearly knocked him over, and she was horrified at how brittle he felt in her arms.

And then he cried.

She held him as he fell apart in her arms and sobbed, muttering about missing her and the children and being afraid they'd taken her too, and that it'd hurt the baby, and then being afraid he'd miss the baby being born, and they stood in that damn room until they were the only ones left, and somehow she found enough strength to lend some to him.

* * *

When they got back to the Potter's, Ginny started heating up all the leftovers she could find and sent Hermione and Draco upstairs to clean up. Once again, Hermione stripped the grimy clothes from her husband's thin frame and scrubbed away at his skin until it was red. He stood in the shower, watching her wash him and fighting to stay conscious.

"It was worse than Azkaban," he murmured, catching her horrified looks through his half-closed eyes.

She dressed him in some of Harry's clothes. They hung from his bones abysmally, but they were warm and soft, and he didn't protest. They made the trek downstairs together; he, trying to support her abnormally large frame, she, trying to support his abnormally scrawny one. They found the kitchen deserted but pots bubbling happily on the stove, as well as a medley of potions waiting for him on the table. She made him take them all, then sat him down to eat.

He ate ravenously, but it was like he couldn't taste the food. She sat across the table from him, feeling almost as lonely as ever, consoling herself that tomorrow, he'd be better. Tomorrow, he'd be hers again.

Ginny arrived with the children a few minutes later, followed by her mother, her own children, and the brood of Weasley grandchildren Molly had evidently been babysitting.

Draco was on the floor with his arms around his children before Hermione could comprehend what was happening, and then Molly went to work in the kitchen, whipping up a fresh meal and attempting to force-feed an only semi-reluctant Draco as a cloud of children hovered around him.

When she'd decided she'd fed him satisfactorily, she sent him off with his family to get some sleep.

Hermione lied in their bed with him at five in the afternoon as he slept. The children had managed to fall asleep as well, and the room was filled with the faint snores of the three. Slowly, she skillfully extracted herself from the tangle to arms and legs on the bed, despite her unwieldy stomach, and when she couldn't take it anymore, she escaped to the back deck.

She sat in the same chair she'd sat in the day they had taken him. Her book was still on the table where their wands had been, and their brooms were still on the grass. It could have been yesterday, had the grass been shorter and the weeds less unruly. No, it seemed they stayed exactly the same, stuck in time, while everything else kept going around them.

She curled up in the chair as best she could and cried. She cried because he'd lost so much of him, because they'd taken so much of him, because of what they'd done to her family, because nothing would be as perfect as it was right before it all became horrible. They'd taken her husband and given her back the shell of a man, and she feared he'd never again be whole.

When she heard the door open, she tried to stifle her tears, but failed miserably.

"Hermione," he whispered behind her, as a tentative hand touched her shoulder. They were no better than strangers.

"I'm fine," she lied reassuringly.

And then he had picked her up and sat down with her on the chaise lounge. He uncurled her body so that she lay on him, her feet at his ankles and her head beneath his chin. He threaded his fingers through her and pulled both of their hands to rest on her swollen belly, where he could detect the faintest of movements.

"I'll crush you," she sniffled. "You shouldn't have strained yourself with picking me up in the first place."

"You're beautiful," he whispered. "I want a picture of you looking this lovely. You may not be able to see your ankles, but pregnancy becomes you, Hermione."

She broke into tears again, hating herself for being weak, hating the Ministry for taking him away, hating herself for being such a stereotypically needy damsel in distress. He wrapped his hands tighter around her and kissed the back of her head as she broke down.

"I'm sorry," she blubbered. "I wanted to be stronger for you. I'm sorry I can't keep myself together. I'm sorry I didn't fight harder for you, for us. I'm sorry..."

She breathed in deep, shuddering gasps and he held her tight, whispering promises in her ear. "You don't have to be strong for me; you're perfect just the way you are. I love you. We're going to be fine, just fine."

* * *

I think I felt most ambiguous about this one. It was an idea I'd been toying with for a while, but in a different setting, and designed to be longer, but in the end I knew it'd never work as a novella. Or rather, _I _could never make it work. I'm not even sure I made it work as a short story. Let me know what you think!

And there is a reference to a certain TV show character in this... I challenge you to find it, and winner gets a prize (that will be more significant than my undying love. Because really, my undying love is quite useless. Even I wouldn't want it.)


	12. Overbearing, Overprotective Fathers

I've decided to stop at 16, as that's my favorite number and it now seems like a good stopping place. This one might be a tad clichéd, but hopefully fun and at least a tad inventive- review and let me know! And I had the next one planned out and it was going to be epic, but now I can't remember… idk, we'll see.

Not epilogue compatible at all. And to avoid confusion, this takes a little over twenty years after DH, and their children's names are Dillon, Christina, and Callum, and Krysia is a muggleborn friend of Christina's bunking with the Malfoys for the summer. All other names and characters are the same. I think I managed to severely screw that up the first time around. Seriously, head meet wall. So I've reposted completely and made more edits. Please don't hate me if you get a notification and realize you're already read this; as soon as I realized how flawed the original was, I took it down completely.

**_Overbearing, Overprotective Fathers_**

* * *

There was no doubt that Christina Malfoy looked gorgeous in the emerald dress that complemented her pale complexion but dark hair just right. There was also no doubt that there was no way in hell her father was going to let her out of the house looking like that.

"I'm seventeen, dad! You can't tell me what to wear anymore!"

"You're still my daughter and you're still living in my house so I _absolutely_ can tell you what to wear, and I'm telling you now that over my dead body will you be leaving this house in that dress!"

"You're being ridiculous!"

"No, I'm being a normal father! You will go back upstairs right this instant and change your clothes!"

"I'm not five years old anymore!"

"No, but I'm sure I five year old would have a better sense of propriety and self-respect!"

"What's that supposed to mean!?! That I look like some sort of slut?!?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact!"

"You're impossible!"

"That very well may be true but if you don't march yourself upstairs right now you'll discover how impossible I can be when you're grounded!"

"MOTHER!"

"HERMIONE!"

Hermione ran to the top of the stair moments later and peered over the railing to her husband and daughter. "What's wro- oh. Oh, oh no. Not this again."

"Mum, tell him that my dress is perfectly acceptable!"

"Hermione, tell her that her dress is perfectly _unacceptable_."

Hermione reluctantly made her way down the stairs to the foyer to intercede in yet another argument. "Christina, you do look stunning and your dress is lovely, albeit a tad revealing. Although, Draco, it isn't quite the source of alarm you seem to think it is. Now, dear, let her finish getting ready. You need to get dressed as well, as our dinner reservation is in just over half an hour. We'll leave right after the girls do."

"No."

"No?"

"No, I'm not going anywhere with you until you, you horrible wrench, until you forbid our daughter from going out like that."

"Pity. I'll miss you."

"Hermione!"

"Christina go help Krysia get ready if you're done," Hermione instructed, dismissing her daughter from the fray. "I'll deal with your father." Christina fled gratefully and left her mother to argue with her father, who didn't even notice her departure.

"I will not be "dealt with" like some petulant toddler, Hermione!"

"She's seventeen, dear, whether or not you like it. You may recall I wore a similar dress to a ball when I was her age."

"Yes, and also recall what happened after you wore that dress!"

"I'm sorry, is that a double-standard that you're speaking of? It was absolutely fine for me to look like that when I was 17, but our daughter is what, supposed to dress like a nun?"

"If that's what it'll take to keep those boys' dirty mits off her, then yes!"

"You're being absolutely ridiculous, you know that! And completely hypocritical! Because were you or were you not once one of those boys with dirty mits? And did you or did you not give your _son_ a book of contraceptive charms and potion recipes, complete with short guide to sex?"

"That's different!"

"How so?" She asked, and they both knew it was a loaded question as she put her hands on her hips and looked him square in the eyes.

"You weren't supposed to know about it!"

She slapped his chest. "Draco!"

"Well, he was older than she is now!"

"By what, a few months?"

"Yes, so?!?"

"You can't have a double standard, Draco! You can't be encouraging one child to go have sex and then tell the other that she's being a slut!"

"Fine, she can wear the damn dress, happy? And I'll tell Dillon to keep it in his pants and I'll take back the stupid book. But if you think I'm just going to sit there politely while some randy teenaged asshole comes to pick up my daughter, then you're truly off your rocker because I demand to be able to talk to the boy and scare him shitless."

Hermione sighed and thought again about how her husband was nothing more than a work-in-progress. Maybe by the time Christina was having children Draco would be able to accept that his daughter was having sex. Not that Hermione herself was particularly fond of thinking that any of her children could be having sex, natural and inevitable as it was.

_**

* * *

**_

Twenty minutes later, the entire Malfoy clan was in the foyer to greet their "guests". Draco, Hermione, Dillon, and Callum stood to see off Christina and Krysia, the honorary Malfoy and semi-permanent houseguest, though the boys were mostly only present to terrify the girls' dates into submission while Hermione worked damage control and shot constant glares at her husband.

"Teddy, you know that Krysia is like a daughter to Hermione and me in addition to being Christina's best friend, do you not?" Draco said to Teddy Lupin, who, much to his chagrin, apparently planned to court his nearly-adopted daughter.

"Yes, sir," Teddy answered dutifully. He spoke politely, but tersely, knowing from multiple warnings from both Krysia and Dillon that if he wanted to survive meeting Draco Malfoy, he damn well better be polite and not say anything that could possibly be twisted around. Though he'd been friends with Krysia for a while, it was the first time he was acting as her date and meeting the Malfoys. He realized that Alden must really love Christina to put up with her father and thanked Merlin that his own girlfriend's parents where much less intimidating.

"Good, so you understand that Dillon and Callum are like Krysia's unofficial brothers, and, as such, would not hesitate in tracking you down and violently dismembering you should she come home under any state of duress. And of course, though her parents are nonmagical and on holiday without her, I have more than enough friends in the ministry to compensate in terms of adequately punishing you. I do take very good care of children left in my charge, you see. I daresay every auror in wizarding England could be dispatched to find you should she not return home by curfew, courtesy of our dear friend Mr. Potter."

Teddy gulped. "Of course, sir. I'll have her home safely and on time."

Draco smiled, and it not unlike that which a vampire would flash to a victim before sinking fangs into soft skin. "Did you know that your mother and I are distantly related?" Draco asked conversationally

"No, sir. I didn't know that."

Draco nodded with a calculated aloofness that Hermione dreaded, knowing that he was about to snap like a snake at its victim. "Great woman, she was. Didn't really know her until almost the end, though, once I switched sides during the war. Your father was a good man as well, and a damn good professor, may they both rest in peace."

"Thank you, sir," Teddy squeaked, unaccustomed to Draco actually acting civil.

Draco nodded. "I'd really hate to have to kill their son for trying to play for bases with my daughter."

There was the threaten Teddy was expecting, though it didn't make him any more comfortable. "Yes sir."

Hermione felt bad for the boy, who looked at if he were about to pee in his pants from nerves, and was about to divert her husband when he switched to harassing Christina's date on his own.

"And of course, you've already been giving ample warnings about touching my daughter, Alden."

"Yes, sir," Alden replied dutifully. He'd already survived the horrors of having dinner with his girlfriend's family but knew that picking up Christina for anything was cause for another warning speech.

"Did you boys know that Blaise Zabini, your dear friend's father, was one of my old friends at school? So of course, he'll be at his son's soiree. I've asked him to keep an eye out for Christina to make sure she doesn't get lost or end up missing in some spare bedroom. I trust Blaise won't have a reason to floo for me?"

"No, sir," came the obedient response."

"Good, good. Blaise will be helping enforce the girls' ten o'clock curfew."

"Twelve," Hermione interposed flatly.

"Hermione!" Draco protested petulantly.

"You let Dillon stay out until two on occasion, and while _that_ was extreme, I demand that you treat the girls fairly. They both have nice dates and I have no doubts that they can handle themselves."

"Great!" Christina interjected, eager to leave now that everything had been settled and her sadistic father had sufficiently terrorized her boyfriend and her mother had mitigated him. "We'll just be off then!"

Draco's lips unfurled from his ugly, predatory scowl into a genuine smile for his daughters. "Have a nice evening, girls." And then he managed to sneak in a last snarl at the boys.

Hermione rolled her eyes, made a mental note to lock him out of the bedroom for being positively awful, and kissed her daughter and almost-daughter on their foreheads, kicking her husband accipurpidentally on the way.

"You both look beautiful. Have a lovely time."

The door shut behind the two nervous couples and Hermione's warm smile fell into a scowl. "Could you have been more terrible?"

"Yes," her husband retorted simply.

She rolled her eyes and looked at her sons. "And you two! You are not your sisters' body guards! You don't have to stand there and look menacing. _You_," she said, waggling her finger at Dillon, "barely even live here anymore, so it's not like you can just pretend to be saying goodbye every time she has a date! Honestly, you'd think she was some fragile little girl! Now I'm sure you all have better things to do so go away and do them before I scream at you more about what sexist bastards you all are!"

Her sons scattered quickly, Dillon making a fast escape through the floo and Callum scampering back upstairs to hide from his mother's wrath. Hermione stood in the foyer, staring at her husband in the middle of their silent house, until he mustered the courage to look at her.

"What?" He asked, his sangfroid image just a façade.

"You know what! You were positively atrocious to those boys! And _ten_? What on earth were you thinking?"

"That any boy who gets up my daughter's skirt dies."

Hermione slapped her husband on the chest. It didn't hurt, she knew, but it still annoyed him, which was almost good enough. "Forget about dinner, I don't feel like sitting at a table with you for approximately two hours, or any length of time, really."

"Well good, because I don't fancy eating with you either!" Draco shot back as she stomped up the stairs. "And just you wait- one day, one of them will come back hurt or pregnant or worse and then you'll wish you'd let me send them both to convents!"

The door to their bedroom slammed and Draco stalked over to the parlor and began setting up his seat for the evening. The newspaper, drinks, never-melting ice, clock; he assembled his usual clutter around him and sank into an armchair in front of the window and prepared for a very long wait.

He was on the third page of the Daily Prophet when Hermione stormed into the parlor.

"Get up," she ordered. She whacked him on the back of the head. "Up, up!"

"Hey!"

"If you think I'm going to just let you sit there for five hours as you wait for them, you've got another think coming."

"Oh, go pester one of your friends or something!"

She grabbed his ear. "I changed my mind. You're taking me to dinner."

"Incorrigible, tempestuous…" he muttered darkly as she pulled him to the front stone patio, beyond the apparition wards. She turned and kissed him hard on the mouth and then pulled away to apparate, and he really had no choice but to follow.

* * *

"If either of those boys hurts the girls, I will personally kill them."

"I know, dear," Hermione replied, bored. They'd been having a lovely conversation for about five minutes of dinner before she accidentally brought up the children and then the dam burst. She'd almost given up on trying to shut him up. "You're worse than Lucius."

He scowled. "Do not compare me to that man!"

"Then don't be so irrational!"

"Hermione!"

"Draco!"

They glared at each other until she stood up. "Are you happy? You've just ruined another perfectly nice evening with your horrible, protective antics. I'm going to go shopping on Diagon Alley and buy potion ingredients and books and you're going to hate everything I come back with but I don't give a damn! And when I come home, you better not be in that damned chair by the window!"

* * *

When she came home, he was in that damned chair by the window. She collapsed into his lap wordlessly, and he wrapped his arms around her as she curled up against his chest. He kissed her forehead and shifted her weight, waiting for her to speak. He'd learned from experience that she would talk when she was ready. Something had happened that had assuaged her anger, he knew, and though Malfoys didn't cuddle, he could consent to this form of comfort.

"I love you, you know," she said randomly.

He kissed her forehead again. "I know. I love you too."

She sighed. "I just… I wish other people would understand. It's been decades, you know, but…"

"Who slighted you?" He asked instinctively. It wasn't a new concept; random people in the street had glared at her, called her a bitch and worse when they had announced their engagement, and though the backlash had been mitigated by her friendship with Ron and Harry, she was still one of the most hated women in Great Britain outside her wide circle of friends. It had been years since anyone had said something to her directly about it, but Draco knew that to some people, 20 years was not enough time to get over the shock of perfect Hermione Granger marrying a converted death eater.

"Some stupid cow at the apothecary… said something dull and unoriginal but rude… I just…"

"I know," he whispered. He'd been dealt the sharper slap, as he didn't even have a protective layer of friends sheltering him from public disapproval, but he cared less about what people said, especially since, for the most part, it was true.

They'd almost refrained from having children because of it. They couldn't imagine subjecting a child to that much hate, or trying to isolate a child, and even if they did manage to keep their prospective children in the safe haven of people who at least liked Hermione, Hogwarts would have been a whole different story.

Luckily, nature had decided for them, and then after Dillon, they had decided they might as well have a few more, and Christina had followed not long after, tailed by Callum. They were slightly surprised that they'd managed to stop at three, for even after the children, they were still almost as active and careless as before.

And yes, Draco Malfoy was protective of his daughter, but he was also protective of his whole family, and if he could hunt down the witch that had offended his wife, he would. It just happened to be that being insanely protective of his daughter was at least culturally acceptable, whereas hexing random but rude witches was not.

He kissed his wife again and held her as she fell asleep. The argument they'd had that afternoon was an old one, and it didn't even matter anymore, for they knew they were both too stubborn for anything to change. They'd fight more later, he knew, and they'd still be fighting if she hadn't been temporarily knocked out of the game by an outside force.

He waited until she fell asleep, then stood slowly, careful to balance her weight in his arms, and began to carry her upstairs. He could use magic to get her upstairs, he knew, and it would probably even be safer, but he liked holding her just as she liked being held.

They were halfway up the stairs when the front door opened. Draco instinctively reached for his wand, shifting his wife's weight and somehow managing to keep her upright. No one came by at night unannounced, and he'd be willing to bet the portion of the Malfoy fortune that hadn't been confiscated by the Ministry that the girls would be returning home late, if anything, and certainly not early.

He was veritably shocked, then, to see Krysia's turquoise and white dress shimmering in the foyer. He was about to step out of the shadow and greet her when she turned.

"He's not here," she whispered. "Hurry, before he takes up his usual post again."

Draco prepared to hex Teddy Lupin into oblivion when his son stepped through the door. Dillon appeared from the shadows and the couple hastily made their way across the foyer and down the hall.

"Remind me to thank Teddy for playing decoy," Dillon whispered. "Dad was certainly in fine form tonight."

"Well, his scheme to make Victoire jealous at the ball certainly worked well enough, didn't it? He's hardly a martyr."

Then, with the click of the door to hidden staircase, the voices stopped and Draco stood, shocked into silence for the first time in his life, trying to process what he'd just witnessed.

"So, if you're encouraging him to date, and threatening to murder anyone that dates her, but _he's_ dating her, where does that leave you?" Draco scowled at his smirking wife and was hit with an overwhelming urge to drop her. And to think he'd been nicely carrying her upstairs because she was sleeping…

"Shut up," he shot back, though he managed to fight the urge to let her battle with gravity. "That leaves me in a very sour mood and with an annoyingly smug wife. Happy?"

She leaned her head against his shoulder. She supposed no one would ever be good enough for either of their daughters, biological or virtually adopted, but Dillon would have to do for Krysia. If only she could find someone her husband wouldn't kill for Christina as well.

"Immensely."

He carried her upstairs anyway, and then, hours later, Christina returned home to find that, for the first time in four years, her father was not waiting in his usual spot.

* * *

I like reviews more than being able to exploit the fact that my father is very _not _overprotective.


	13. Unwell

This was a random scene that popped into my head one day that I decided to write. It is gratuitously sappy, but after the last chapter, I think it's quite needed, although the juxtaposition makes me feel bi-polar. Anyway, enjoy!

* * *

**_Unwell_**

There were moments when he felt closer to her then anyone in the world had right to. It always hit him suddenly and unexpectedly, and made his nerves tingle like he was being tased, but pleasantly.

The first time, they'd only been dating three months, and he'd almost blurted out that he loved her, but was later glad that he had restrained himself. Instead he asked her to move in with him, and she refused, and his momentary euphoria ended. Or maybe it was just momentary insanity. In love, indeed, he scoffed later that night as he nursed a firewhiskey alone in his flat while contemplating how exasperating his girlfriend was.

It happened again a few months after that. And then again. And again. And if he didn't absolutely love it for the high, he would have absolutely hated it for happening so arbitrarily. It happened at the most opportune times, like when he was kissing her or going out to eat, and it made him want to do all sorts of sappy things, like pull his hand from under her shirt and just hold her, or silently gaze into her lovely eyes from across the table. It was quite horrible, really.

By his count, he'd felt that weird spasm a total of nine times, and they'd only been dating a year. At first, he thought it was medical problem, like some rare and serious nerve disorder that would be dramatic and terminal enough to have her at his beck and call, but not serious enough to actually hurt him. Unfortunately, and much to his chagrin, the healers hadn't found anything wrong with him, and the stupid bimbo who'd been treating him only smiled knowingly after he once he described the particular instances in more detail.

"You're fine," she'd assured him. "And you'll understand soon enough."

It had taken two days for his scowl to wear off.

That had been months ago, though, and he still didn't understand, and after it had happened the next time, when he had look over just in time to catch Hermione laughing at her own mis-step over Teddy's head while the three ice skated together, he nearly went back to the healers to _make _them fix it.

And then she'd kissed him while Teddy was distracted, and he decided that going to St. Mungo's for a silly little electric buzz would be a ridiculous waste of time that would better be spent snogging her. Of course, then Teddy had looked back at them, and they'd stopped, and he began contemplating St. Mungo's again. He made a mental note to take himself there directly once they'd returned Teddy to his grandmother, except then they'd ended up at his flat, doing slightly more than just snogging, and he'd decided that St. Mungo's could wait.

And now. Now he was sitting in the car she'd rented for the weekend, watching her drive very fast on the wrong side of the rode, getting her own sort of natural high, he supposed. She had the windows down, letting the warm Mediterranean air in, as she blasted ridiculous muggle music on the stereo. The Grasshoppers, she'd said, maybe. Or maybe some other insect. He couldn't remember, and couldn't be arsed to care as long as they stopped singing to some woman named June before he hexed the blasted contraption.

And then they hit a bump in the road and the car bounced, and she didn't scream like she would have if they'd been a broom, but instead had laughed, and he laughed, because it was just so ridiculous and yet _delicious_ that he was in France, enjoying a holiday on the coast with her, and that he was in a crazy muggle car while she drove like a maniac, and that he'd gotten over his prejudices long enough to ask her out, and that she'd gotten over _her_ prejudices long enough to accept, and that neither had killed the other during their year-long relationship.

They'd come to France to celebrate making it a year without her shoving her head in an oven to escape his insufferable and general git-iness. For him, it was to celebrate the fact that he'd remained celibate _and _faithful during their relationship. Or maybe it was closer to lamenting the fact that the celibacy hadn't been by choice. At least, not _his_ choice.

"What are you going to do when I tell people you drive like a madman?" He taunted as he wondered when that delicious and irritating feeling in his nerves would fade this time, half-wondering if he ever wanted it to.

She laughed again and he wanted to kiss her suddenly, but restrained himself because her driving was nearly deadly as it was. "They'd never believe you. Half the people don't even know what driving is anyway, and the other half would never think me capable of acting like a teenager."

He laughed and decided it was safe to put his hand on her knee. The sensation pulsating under his skin sizzled and buzzed with renewed strength. "Oh, but you are."

She blushed. "This is my one indulgence, you know. And I only drive like an idiot when it doesn't hurt anything. It's not like I'm going to run us into a tree or anything, and there's no one else on the road, and I like the controlled danger. You can understand that, can't you?" She smiled confidently but her nervous glance in his direction undermined the façade.

But of course he could understand, because it was her. And even if he couldn't, he could accept it and wait to understand, because it was _her_. He loved the moments when he felt closer to her than anyone, when she revealed her secrets to him, when she didn't balk when he revealed his. The need to kiss her senseless only intensified, but he couldn't act on it because she was still driving.

"I understand," he murmured, hoping she understood that the word _you_ was implied at the end of the statement, hoping she knew him just as well as he thought he knew her.

She smiled brightly again and squeezed his hand.

His eyes widened as his nerves burned delightfully and then it made sense. "YOU!" He bellowed as his eyes were wide with terror.

Her own eyes widened in surprise. "What?" She asked self-consciously, wondering what had happened to the moment they had just shared.

"You're the common factor!"

"To what?"

"To my episodes! You're always there when they happen, and then you always do something to ruin my mood and the feeling fades! You're the determinant! It's you! Merlin, this is all _your _fault!"

She took her foot off the accelerator and placed it steadily on the brake, neglecting the road to look at the crazy man beside her. "What are you going on about?"

"I love you!" He yelled before he could process his own thoughts.

She stepped on the brake too hard and gripped the steering wheel hard to keep from hitting her head on it.

"What?!?"

"I love you! It all makes sense now! That stupid bimbo of a doctor said I would understand in time, and I do! I'm not having some sort of panic attack or seizure, I'm just in love with you! Oh thank Merlin!"

And then he kissed her senseless like he wanted, and when he pulled away to view her flushed lips and half-lidded eyes, he couldn't resist the urge to kiss her again, and so he did.

He loved her, he loved her, he loved her, he thought to himself in a gleeful mantra. "I love you," he repeated to her over and over between their kisses. When he finally pulled away, he drank her in, and spoke without thinking. "I love that you think Snape needs a hug and that you're trying to get Neville and Luna together and that you're determined to convince house elves that they have rights too and that you helped Weasley come out of the closet and that you agreed to date me after I screamed a proposition at you in the middle of a fight and that you don't care I'm emotionally dysfunctional and that you aren't perfect and that you _are_ anyway, despite the atrocious driving, and I love you, I love you, I love you," he rambled breathlessly and then laughed and said it again, marveling at the words. It made sense. It felt right. _She _felt right.

She laughed and he felt even more in love and then she kissed him hard on the mouth but pulled back before he could react. "I love you too," she whispered. "You make my nerves buzz like an instrument that's been wound too tightly, but it a good way, like I'm _your _instrument, and you know exactly how to make the perfect melody."

"Does the feeling ever go away?" He whispered, now that the mysterious tingling was identified. She wouldn't be at his beck and call as he suffered from a disease with a preposterous name, he mused, but this was better.

"No," she murmured as her lips captured his again and the amount of time they spent snogging was remarkable given how unnatural it was for them to be sitting side by side in the car.

And, as always, Hermione Granger was right.

* * *

I'm a tad sad that the food motif seems to have died. Maybe I'll attempt to resurrect it...

I like reviews more than I like driving late at night with the windows down as I speed and blast Abba!


	14. The TimeTraveler's Wife

* * *

This is definitely not my favorite, which makes me sad, but three other one-shots died before this one was conceived and born, so I guess I have to honor its status as a survivor.

**_The Time-Traveler's Wife_**

"Hermione," he whispered in her ear. "Hermione, wake up." He shook her shoulder gently.

She turned and groaned groggily, and then, suddenly realizing the voice in her room was foreign, sat up and screamed. His pale hand clamped down on her mouth before the sound had evolved in her throat, and she found herself pushed up against the headboard.

She bit his hand and grabbed her wand from the bedside table, hexing him while scrambling off the bed. He deflected it easily and advanced on her as she stumbled backwards through her room to the door. She grabbed the handle with her free hand but it burned her palm and she screamed before his palm covered her wailing lips again and didn't let go when she bit him again.

She tried more curses, only to find his fingers wrapped tightly around her wrist, forcing her to release her wand. It clattered to the floor as he pushed her against the wall, using his weight against her. He anticipated her every attack against him, and stepped on her toes just as she thought of kneeing him in the groin. She struggled relentlessly until she could barely breathe and then he screamed at her.

"Ron's going to kill you!" He yelled. "Ron's going to kill if you don't shut up right now or just stop fighting me!"

She went limp and realized that the oppressive weight of his hand against her mouth was absent. "What?" she managed to ask, suddenly realizing how dry her tongue felt forming the words.

He took a deep breath and relaxed, satisfied that she was no longer trying to kill him. He leaned his forehead against hers and she was suddenly shocked at how old he looked. "In a few years. More than a few, actually. You'll get married after Hogwarts, after Harry and Ginny get married. In fact, if I got the time right, he proposed to you tonight, didn't he?"

She nodded mutely, and he continued. "It will take another three years for you to actually get married, though. It'll be in the first year, during complications and delays because of Harry and Ginny's wedding, that we become more than the casual friends that you think we are now. That will become a sore spot with Ron, but you'll refuse to give in to his "jealous insanity", as you put it." He smiled softly. He'd been relatively gentle with her even as she tried to assault him, but that was the first time he looked at her tenderly. The moment ended quickly though, and she began doubting what she thought she saw.

"Then your wedding will finally be on the horizon and you'll lose control of your magic. You won't tell anyone but me, because the same thing happened to me before we became friends. By the time you're under control again, there will be merely days before your wedding. You'll have a typical hen's night bash with you girl friends two days before your wedding, and you'll be the only one who isn't completely hung over afterwards."

"How do you know this?" She breathes and he pulls back just slightly to give her space.

He smiles sardonically, losing his typical smirk. "You're a smart girl, Hermione. Surely you realize I don't look like the Draco Malfoy you know now?" She forced herself to nod. He looked older, in a way that was more than just weary. He physically looked years older.

"You came back, from the future," she said as her head began to swim. This was not happening. "Why?"

"Can I continue to give back story?" He asked, and she nodded, feeling slightly dizzy.

He took that as confirmation to continue and held her steady with his hands on his shoulders as his eyes bore into hers. "The night _after_ your hen's night bash, you showed up at my flat, already well on your way to becoming very, very smashed. I should have stopped you, but I was more than a tad tipsy as well, and we drank copiously. Alround the time you could no longer walk in a straight line, you began to sob uncontrollably. You didn't want to marry him. You hated what you'd gotten yourself into, and you… you told me that you loved me. You told me that you realized you wanted to at least try things with me the night he proposed, that you said yes because you couldn't say no, and then you couldn't say no because you felt trapped. I told you I loved you too, and then we snogged sloppily. After that you clammed up, and spent the night on my bathroom floor, taking turns puking with me, because we were both too stupid to use magic to sober up. We passed out together in the bathtub around three, and when I woke up, you were gone.

"When I woke up the next day, you were gone. I apparated to your flat, but you weren't there either, and then I noticed your dress was gone too, and all the other bridal crap you'd laid out on your guest bed while your alcohol-stained clothes from the night before sat in a heap on the floor. I looked at the obnoxious cat-clock on your wall and knew that you'd done it anyway, that you didn't runaway, and that by the time I had woken up that morning, you were already Mrs. Ron Weasley.

"You didn't contact me after that. You got back from your honeymoon and came by my flat to collect odds and ends you'd left, and told me it'd be best if we never spoke again. You apparated before I could get a word in. I saw you here and there after that, but Weasley was extra possessive after you got married, and you two never seemed to stay at a party long after you realized I was there too. I confronted you once, when I caught you alone at the Ministry, and then a few times after that. You always screamed at me and told me we couldn't talk anymore, and left these subtle and cryptic hints about the real nature of your relationship with Ron, but I was always too pissed to pay attention.

She notices absently that he switched into the past tense halfway through his discourse and realized that for him, at least, it _was _past tense. The dizziness intensified but he continued more slowly. "Then, the last time I confronted you, nearly two years into your marriage, you screamed at me to leave you alone, and that you were pregnant. I let you go after that. The next time I heard of you, it was in the Daily Prophet. You and Ron had fought, and he shoved you. You slipped and fell down the stairs backwards and…"

He didn't need to complete sentence; the look on his face told her everything. She'd died, she knew. Ron had pushed her, just like he'd done a thousand times before, and she'd fallen backwards down the stairs and probably snapped her neck and died instantly.

"Give me your hand," he ordered quietly, not looking at her as he broke the unwieldy silence between them. She placed her burned palm in his and he brought it up to inspect the angry red welt. With a simple wand movement, the pain she hadn't even noticed disappeared.

He flipped her hand over and she found herself staring at her engagement ring. Under his stare, the ring felt heavy and her cheeks flushed with hot shame. "You'll give it back to him," he told her flatly. "You have to."

"Why did you come back to now?" She evaded as he dropped her hand but kept his fingers laced with her.

"Because it starts now," he told her simply. "This is the beginning of the end for us. This is year you realize that you want more with me, and this is where Ron begins to become abusive."

She closed her eyes and gulped in air and tried to stay steady. "Why didn't you tell your past self instead?" She asked, trying to evade responsibility, hoping she could manage to sink into her floor until someone came to rescue her from her mess of a life.

He grinned sardonically again and she began to long for the familiar, irritating, endearing smirk. "My past self has just begun to fall for you. According to your drunken rambling, you're already half-way there, and, by my calculations, more susceptible to heeding my advice. Also, he'd be more likely to kill me; you used a jelly-legs hex, for Merlin's sake."

She managed a smile. Yes, she agreed, between the two of them, she_ was _less likely to kill him. She hadn't done anything to him because he was right, she was already falling for him, and that terrified her. It was scary how much she felt for the man standing too close to her because he simply looked like someone she felt something for, despite the fact that he looked to be about ten years older, and logically, she knew, he was in an entirely different plane of existence.

"I can't just break up with my fiancé because someone who resembles someone I know breaks into my house and predicts the future. I might as well listen to Trelawney," she protested, because she_ couldn't_ be on the verge of just blindly following his advice. He was almost not even _real_.

He nodded. "I know. If you weren't skeptical, you wouldn't be you. It boils down to the fact that we both know you feel something rather not-platonic towards me, and that you would rather not be in your relationship with Ron. You need to a bit of a nudge in the right direction, though. That's why I'm here."

"I think you should leave now," she said.

He shook his head sadly. "You still don't believe me."

She was once against startled by the depth of his perception. "How do you know that?"

"If you believed me, you would do something about it. You wouldn't marry Ron. The whole calamitous chain of events that brought me here would never have begun, and I wouldn't be here."

It made sense, she supposed, in that crazy, mixed up scenario. She closed her eyes and slide down the door, bringing her knees to her chest as she willed herself to make sense of it all. He crouched beside her. "Hermione," he whispered. "You can't marry Ron. You don't have to… you don't have to seek me out. You don't have to make the first move with me if you're too afraid. You wouldn't be rejected, I can promise you that, but my past self didn't think you felt anything deeper than friendship until that drunken night. Maybe a drastic turn of events would change things. I don't know. Just don't, don't marry Ron, alright? I can live with loving you from afar, as long as you're alive, as long as you're well. Don't marry Ron. Don't be miserable and abused, please. You have to pull yourself out of it."

She shook her head. "I don't believe you," she still protested, not believing her own lies.

He sighed. "You like muggle music. You listen to Regina Spektor and love the song "Eet". You're not so much afraid of brooms as you are of proving your own ineptitude at something. You'd rather drive, because it's familiar. You never got along well with your cousins and never felt included in anything until Hogwarts. Hopscotch was your favorite game as a child, because you can play it alone. Your biggest pet peeve is when people pretend to know more than they do. You rather despise your reputation and hate being pigeon-holed as "the bookworm". You like to put chili powder in your grilled cheese, and sometimes you'll throw bits of chicken in too and pretend it's a Panini. You read the Sunday comics by starting with the front page, then the back, then go backwards and up the page. You have more hats than you'd care to admit hidden in your closet. And you suspect you feel something towards me that you won't put a name to," he reminded her with a smile.

She took in a deep, shuddering breath. "You really do know me."

"Of course I do. I've spent four years being your best friend, and three years loving you."

She sucked in another deep breath. He really did know her, she realized, and that meant he really did end up being her best friend, and that meant he was telling the truth, and that she really did have to listen to her.

"So you're saying that I have to break up with Ron and blindly follow a feeling and hope that it ends well?" She asked slowly for clarification.

He nodded. "And it'll be hard. It'll suck, probably. But you can do it, you know, and you already think you might want to. Get up your Gryffindor courage."

She blinked in one last attempt to convince herself the man in her room was no real. He did not fizzle out, and she did not wake up, and she knew, with heavy certainty, that he was very much real. She touched his cheek and felt the cool skin beneath her finger tips. "You need to leave," she told him again.

He nodded but looked troubled. "I suppose I do."

He kissed her on the forehead and stood slowly. From her vantage point on the floor she watched him pull the time-turner from his cloak and begin to twist it calculatedly, a dejected look on his face. He stopped suddenly and she swore she caught a glimpse of a smile on his face before he began to fade and disappeared before her eyes.

She sat and listened to her clock ticking and she counted her pulse while avoiding planning. She absently reached up to touch her door handle and found the metal once again cool beneath her hand, but the ring continued to sear her finger.

With a decisive movement, she pulled it off and adhered it to a piece of parchment before beginning a short note to Ron.

Watching her owl fly into the rising sun, she realized how much easier it had been than she had expected. That thought in mind, she picked up a second piece of parchment and began a letter to Draco Malfoy.

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I like reviews more than Draco Malfoy sneaking into my room in the middle of the night. Also, I encourage you all to read my horribly strange one-shot "Love Games". Because who doesn't love Tetris/Solitaire crossover love stories?


	15. Worst Double Date in the History of Ever

I will admit, everyone is horribly OOC in this and I absolutely love it anyway. It just kind of happened.

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**_The Worst Double Date in the History of Ever_**

7:46.

A short 17 minutes before they could leave. She'd decided that it would be too obvious to leave at 8:00 exactly, so they were going to make a hasty exit at 8:03. She had found a relatively simple, discreet spell to make him feverish, tired, and generally ill, and planned to execute the spell at 7:56, so that by 8:03, it would not look like the terribly contrived exit it was.

He didn't know about that part of her plan yet.

7:47.

16 minutes.

She didn't know what worse: that she had known dinner would be so awkward and not suddenly had to cancel, or that she was counting the minutes, or that she was planning to make her husband violently ill. The latter of which she didn't feel so bad about; she'd make it up to him, and he'd be glad to get out no matter the cost anyway.

"Dinner is great, mum," she said, breaking a four minute silence. She knew; she'd timed it.

The boys mumbled their noncommittal agreement and her mum blushed her gratitude and insisted it had been no trouble.

This would be so much less awkward if she hadn't walked in on them naked.

It had pretty much gone like this:

She had run by her mother's house to pick up a book she'd left there. Instead, she had discovered her mother and the boyfriend her mother had failed to mention shagging on the kitchen table. She had run out of the house, mentally scarred and almost ready to gauge her eyes out. She had then fastidiously ignored both of them until her husband had thrown her over his shoulder and carried her back to her mother's house while she threatened to divorce him. Instead, she and her mum had a tearful reunion and, in a fit of what would later be described as hormonal dementia, had the brilliant idea of double dating.

The movie part of the double date had been decent. She'd sat between her husband and her mother and pretended her mother's boyfriend—a word she cringed at when associating with that man—didn't exist at all. It had really only been bad because snogging your husband in the back of a movie theater was significantly awkward if your mother were sitting next to you, and snogging that prat would have been the only thing she could have done to make the most boring movie ever made significantly less boring.

Then they'd gone to her mother's house to cook dinner. That part had been bearable as well; she could busy herself with tossing the salad and setting the table while _he _made soup and her mother put the her frozen casserole in the oven and her husband did absolutely nothing like the prat that he was.

But now that they were actually eating, everything was awkward and terse and she was having a very difficult time _not _remembering that she was sitting just about exactly where they had been shagging.

7:50.

13 more minutes.

6 more minutes before she could hex her husband. She was actually looking forward to it, now, scruples be damned; if he hadn't kidnapped her in the first place, she would have continued awkwardly not talking to her mother until they did something less catastrophic to make up. Maybe if they'd waited a month or twenty more they would have planned a mother-daughter bonding spa trip instead. Maybe she'd make her husband go on a spa trip with her in retaliation.

The idea died instantly. He'd enjoy far too much.

"So, how did you two meet?" Draco asked them, trying to make polite conversation. He really wanted to say "you _are_ using protection to prevent her from conceiving your devil spawn, right?" but that probably wouldn't be considered polite conversation. It _would_ be looking after the gene pool, but it wouldn't be polite conversation.

She blushed and he continued to stare coldly and Hermione and Draco wondered, for the thousandth time, why on Earth they were together. The love she had with her husband had made more sense than this, and their love didn't even make sense.

"We met at your graduation ceremony, actually; I was hopelessly lost and happened to ask him for directions, and since he was going to the ceremony as well, he escorted me there and we talked along the way. We met at a few other things, like the war commemoration, and then at your wedding, actually, we decided to start dating."

Oh good lord; they'd met the day she and Draco had decided to start over again, she realized, and then begun dating the day she'd gotten married. She'd never look at her wedding pictures the same way again.

Draco looked as pale as she felt. "That's... nice," she said. She distracted herself by thinking that her illness hex may actually be unnecessary if he continued to look at pale and pathetic as he did now.

"I know it's... unconventional," her mother qualified. "But we're happy."

"We're happy for you," Draco offered.

Hermione fought a very strong urge to gag and her husband elbowed her very subtly. "Very, very happy for you," she added.

"So it would appear," _he_ drawled. Her skin crawled. She preferred it when he was just silently brooding.

Hermione put another huge forkful of casserole in her mouth and wished it weren't so easy to chew. Shoving forkfuls of food into her mouth like a starving pregnant woman would only keep her from having to make polite conversation for so long.

7:53.

She would finally get to hex her husband in three minutes, which would be fun if he weren't already looking a tad queasy.

Her mother seemed to notice about the same time she did. "Draco, dear, are you feeling alright?" She reached across the table and touched his forehead. "You're burning up."

"I'm fine, Mrs. Granger, really, but thank you," he replied.

She worried her lip. "Call me Jane, darling, and are you sure? You're uncharacteristically pale and your eyes look strange. You're not drunk, are you?"

"No, no, of course not," he said kindly. "Though the wine is really wonderful and goes perfectly with your excellent meal."

She blushed. "You're already married to my daughter; you don't need to butter me up," her mother demurred, but then shifted tones. "But really, let me get you some cold medicine..."

She stood, and she watched as, even in his strange state, his eyes momentarily brightened as he realized how to milk the situation to his advantage. "I'm fine, really," he insisted. "I've got prescription headache relief potions at home for episodes like these."

Jane's eyes widened and she turned to her daughter. "Hermione, take that boy home and make him get a good night's sleep, okay? And let me know how you feel in the morning, dear; I'll make you some of my grandmother's chicken noodle soup if you're still under the weather.

"No, mum; let me help you with the dishes first," Hermione insisted completely secretly insincerely as the four rose from the table.

Her mother replied with a vague hand gesture. "Nonsense; it's nothing, really, with the dishwasher, and your poor husband is ill. I'll package you up some leftovers and you two can scoot on home," she said as she disappeared into the kitchen.

"I'll get the coats," her husband muttered as he walked out of the room as well.

"Did you hex my husband?" Hermione asked her mother's _(shudder) _lover before he could escape the room as well. He did not dignify that with a response, but from the slow curl of his lip into a smirk, she knew she had guessed correctly, and so his smirk was met with a wide grin of her own. "I suppose I should thank you, but I'll admit, I'm a bit peeved I couldn't try the _infirmus eger _hex on him myself."

And then her mother and her husband came back in and she was ushered out the door with hasty goodbyes, and she smiled as she realized that every single one of the four of them had been conspiring to end the evening early.

* * *

"...so," Draco drawled, his head rested on her shoulder as they walked to the apparation point. He was almost a dead weight on her side, and she could have used a counter-curse on him, she just didn't want to yet. She'd do it while he was sleeping and then he'd never suspect foul play. "Your mum and ... _him." _

She grimaced. "She's a grown woman, and it's been years since dad passed away; she can date, if she wants." She had intended to sound mature and grown-up, because she knew her mother deserved to be happy, and if _he _made her happy, then well, okay, but then she added, "of course, I'm a grown woman too, and if I happen to kill him, well, then, I can do what I want to too."

He smiled into her neck. "I don't think dueling him would bode well for you, my dear." She had half a mind to be indignant that he didn't believe she could do it, but she knew that he would have her dead where she stood before she could even raise her wand. "And anyway, he deserves to be happy and have some stability. I'm sorry _your _mum is getting saddled with him, but she's kind and nurturing without pitying, and that's exactly what he needs. It's not so bad."

She made a face. "I have a very bad memory and a pensieve to prove otherwise."

He laughed, and if he kept laughing, she fully intended to use the pensieve to shut him up. He wouldn't be laughing if he'd had to witness _that_. "I think it's a miracle he didn't kill you for that."

She huffed. "I think it's a miracle _I _didn't kill me for that."

He kissed her and she smiled. He had a strange habit of being affectionate when he was sick or drunk. "I'm glad no one's killed you. Sex just wouldn't be the same if you were dead."

Affectionate, but still an ass, she amended.

"Anyway, he's not really so bad once you get to know him. I think he just never liked you because you were friends with Harry, really, and now he kind of has to like you, because he's shagging your mum, and if she gets mad at him for being mean to you, he'll get cut off from the kitty supply."

She groaned. "Draco, really? If comforting and supportive were a class, you would have failed with "troll"."

"What an original insult," he retorted, then stopped walking. "This is the apparation point, isn't it?" He asked.

She nodded tiredly and he pulled away from her side before kissing her forehead absently. "See you at home in a few seconds," he told her. She heard the crack as he disappeared, yawned, and then disapparated herself.

"Draco?" She called once she landed in the foyer.

"In the kitchen," he replied. She kicked off her heels—another one of her truly brilliant ideas of the night—and met him there. He handed her a glass of champagne.

"What's this for?" She asked. Dear lord, she was almost considering taking her mother's advice and sending him to bed just so she wouldn't have to put up with his repertoire and mood swings.

"To finding happiness in the most unusual of places," he toasted. "To us, and to your mum and her boyfriend." He actually managed not to laugh at the word "boyfriend".

She held back a grimace and agreed. "To mum and Snape."

* * *

Fun fact: Serverus Snape is the only atypical character name from Harry Potter in my predictive text (okay, maybe not _the _only one, but, the only one I've found so far).

Funner fact: I like reviews.


	16. The End

To Kaleesha on the happy occasion of her first break up. And congratulations, your whole first relationship has been chronicled in this story. Next time, no personal remarks, I promise.

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**_The End_**

It was different when it was yours, they'd always told him. He'd doubted the validity of that statement, because he couldn't imagine himself ever regarding a child with more than strained indifference, especially given his background and the knowledge that for his father, at least, it hadn't been different. Draco had hated his father for many reasons, but never truly being a father in the first place was first and foremost on the list. As much as Draco didn't want to be like the bitter old man, he couldn't see a way out of it; he was his father's son, and as much as he hated it, he couldn't seem to find a way to tear his soul from the skin that fettered it.

He'd always been the first to glare at a squawking baby and its ill-advised parents, just like his father had been. He'd never really liked children, not even when he was once himself. He couldn't imagine that life-long peculiarity changing.

His wife had thought he was crazy.

"Of course you'd like it!" She had shouted at him, aghast after his confession in the early days of their marriage. "Everyone likes their own children!"

And yet, her heartfelt assurance hadn't assured him at all. And then a few years later, she was pregnant, and he was more terrified than he'd ever been in his life. He was going to screw it up, he knew. He wanted so desperately to be a good father, and to love his child, but he was sure he wouldn't be able to.

His thoughts and fears kept him up late at night. He had nightmares about the baby all the time. Usually, they were scenes from his own miserable childhood, but changed; instead of his father, it was him, and the eyes through which he saw the scenes unfold had been his in memory, but became the eyes of his child. To remedy the situation, he usually didn't sleep at all, or, when he was desperately tired, would take a dreamless sleep potion.

And then there was the night that neither would do. Astoria was sleeping on her back, something he vaguely recalled the healer's telling her not to do because of blood flow, but he couldn't help from staring at her swollen belly. A baby was in there, he knew, but it seemed so strange, so surreal. She was seven months pregnant, but he'd never felt the baby. He was afraid the baby would feel his presence, and he, in return, would feel nothing.

But that night, his exhaustion limiting his insane fears, and with the quiet dark blanketing him, he reached out a tentative hand and touched the bulge where he knew his child was growing.

"Hi," he whispered as his thumb grazed the soft flesh. He felt silly, but compelled nonetheless. "I'm your daddy." He felt both giddy and nauseous with the word. "I don't really know how to be, but I'll try, I promise, and if you hate me, I'll understand."  
It was a quiet admonition and only a small step, but for him, it was relief enough. He turned his wife onto her side and wrapped his arms around her pregnant stomach, and for the first time in months, he slept unaided and without nightmares.

And that was the beginning of the end of Draco Malfoy.

Then the baby was born, and Draco realized with a sudden flood of relief, that they'd been right all along; it was different when it was your child. Scorpius, he loved, beyond any measure. It didn't matter that his father hadn't loved him, so long as he loved his son, and that was what would make all the difference.

He'd given full credence to the saying for the next few years, but then had begun to doubt it again, when he realized that he could actually at least tolerate, and sometimes even appreciate, the little brats that his son called "friends". It was strange for him, but not a wholly unwanted feeling.

But then the myth he'd put so much faith in shattered completely nearly a decade later, after divorcing Astoria and while engaged to Hermione, when he realized that it wasn't different_ just_ when they were your own. He'd been at her home for the holidays, with his son and her children, when he found himself alone in the library with her daughter.

Without preamble, Rose had marched up to him and looked him squarely in the eye with confidence that far exceeded her years. "If you hurt my mom like my dad did, I won't kill you or castrate you or something silly like that." She informed him. "I will make you wish I would just kill you, but I won't, and instead, you'll suffer in pain and guilt."

And with that declaration, she left the room, and he became a father again.

While he'd met her children before and liked them just fine, he'd never expected to love them. That made the sudden shock of realizing that he loved his future-step-daughter even more unexpected, and yet, he understood, for Rose was just as protective as Hermione as he was, and that was endearing to him. It made him what to protect the little girl that had been so hurt by her father's betrayal.

But now he was going to lose that little girl who had grown up and had her own child. He was going to lose everything and everyone, now, he knew; this was the end. His grief for his wife was compound, encompassing both sorrow for the woman he had loved and the life she had inevitably taken with her when she was gone. Namely, the family. Their family.

Because they had been a family, somehow, the five of them. It had never been a matter of yours and mine, just ours; he had loved her children as if they were his own, and she, his. They parented together, and equally. They hadn't been a perfect family by any means, but it was a better, happier, healthier family than he had ever imagined of having. He realized at last that the ubiquitous "they" had been wrong; it wasn't different when it was yours, it was different if you loved them.

They'd thought about having children of their own, in the beginning. They'd reached the conclusion, though, that as much as they wanted a child with her hair and his eyes, they didn't want to start over. They knew it'd be like having two families, with the two sets children being so far apart in age. They'd realized that could never have it all, their children from their failed previous marriages and children of their own in one nice, tidy package. They'd given up the chance to raise children together, to experience pregnancy and birth and childhood together, for the prospect of the family they already had. They'd been happy, the five of them; it would have been hard for an outsider to tell that they were a blended family. He'd never regretted the decision until now, now that it was too late, now that it was all over. Now that it was the end.

It was back yours and mine, now; now that her children were no longer tied to him through her. They'd be kind about it, he knew, but nonetheless, they would leave him, because he wasn't really their father, and they weren't really bond to him.

He thought about all of them, because it was easier than thinking about her, because he had some degree of control in losing them, at least. He would lose Hugo first, probably, and so he would lose the Serena, the daughter-in-law he did not love, but was fond of, and their four children. Rose would be next, and Rose would cling at least a bit, he knew, for he had been more of a father to her than he had been to Hugo. Little Gwen would go with her mother, he knew, if only because she was too young to have a choice in he matter.

Gwen would hurt the most. Gwen, the only one of Hermione's progeny to have that awful hair he loved so, and yet, her mother's eyes and the pale skin he could pretend was his own. Gwen, who made him wish he'd known Rose when she was that young, unspoiled by the emotional trauma of her parent's divorce. Gwen, who had already suffered so much in her short life, and who was so much stronger than the other grandchildren.

"Dad..." Scorpius said from behind him, laying a tentative hand on his father's shoulder. Scorpius would be last, Draco knew, and it would hurt even more, because the bonds between them wouldn't be severed so cleanly. The two of them alone didn't make much of a family; he'd spent his holidays with his wife's family now, Draco knew. The family they'd once been a part of had died with her, and things would be different. "Dad, we should go to the reception now. I'll take you side-along apparation."

Draco shook his head. "I can do it," he said dully, and with a crack, he was gone from that wretched place of green despair, and he went from the frying pan into the fire itself, to the reception, full of people who wanted to talk about their memories with her, and what a great woman she was, hurt more. He didn't want to listen to people drone on about what a shame it was she was muggleborn, for muggleborns typically didn't have the same incredible longevity normal wizards did. He didn't want any more reminders that death had taken her, and nothing he could do could bring her back.

He talked to her former friends as little as he could and avoided her tactless ex-husband as much as he could, and when sufficient time had passed, he went to a back room to hide until it was acceptable for him to leave completely. He'd just found a nice place to sit and watch the gloomy rain through the window when the door opened again, and he heard the tell-tale pitter-patter of those little feet in the shoes in the tiny patent leather shoes he'd bought her on an impulse the last time he'd taken her shopping.

"Poppy, are you sad?" The little girl climbed into his lap, and he held her close.

"Yes, angel, I suppose I am," he said slowly, not wanting to tell her that "sad" was a terrible understatement. He didn't want to tell her the words that better described his pain, as if not giving them a name would prevent them from being able to hurt her. Seven year olds didn't need to hear phrases like "horribly and completely torn with an emotional agony that rivals physical torment".

"Mummy says that nana is with daddy now, in heaven," Gwen supplied.

"Your mummy is absolutely correct," he assured her. He didn't add that he only believed in heaven, only believed in God, because he had to believe that somehow, someday, he'd see his wife again.

**

* * *

**

He didn't see them much after that. The flower deliveries had finally stopped, and every last sordid bouquet had been summarily destroyed. The house elves kept him relatively well-fed, and Scorpius dropped by with red eyes every once in a while to check on him. He was fine, he always promised, and he really was, so long as he had a bit of Odgen's finest to knock him out for the rest of the night so he wouldn't have to remember the way she'd always sat in that chair reading late into the night, or the way she'd always loved those pictures in the hall. Every room was a reminder of her. It was torture for him, but he was a masochist, and it was a torture he wouldn't do without.

When the door bell rang, he was surprised, and took his wand, promising himself that if it were another florist making a delivery, he really would hex them this time. Instead he found his daughter—his ex-step-daughter, he reminded himself forcibly—balancing her daughter on one hip, and her supernaturally large bag on the other.

"Well, you look like Hell, now, don't you?" Rose said brightly as she thrust her daughter at him as best she could with one arm. "Here, take Gwen," she said unnecessarily as he scrambled to catch the little girl. She was really too big to be carried, but he didn't protest.

Rose reached out to touch his cheek. "You've lost weight," she noted. "And you could pack to spend a fortnight in Paris with the bags under your bloodshot eyes."

"Good to see you too," he retorted emotionlessly.

"Hi, Poppy!" Gwen squeaked.

"Hi, angel," he replied, mustering a small smile for her sake.

"I've brought you food, and dreamless sleep potions, and some very official-looking forms. Go play; I'll call you when lunch is ready." With her mother's sanction, Gwen squirmed to be let down, and then the little girl took her grandfather's hand and all but dragged him outside.

The playground had been added to the manor gardens nearly thirty years previous, when Scorpius was still too small to walk. The brightly-painted wood beams had lasted the ages with a bit of magical aid, though, and looked almost new. Draco ran a hand over the thick varnish, thinking of how different his life had been back then, and then Gwen asked tugged at his hand again.

"Poppy, are you still sad?" She asked, and her concern was endearing

"Only a little, angel," he lied.

She looked at him. "Mummy is a lot sad. She cries like she did when daddy died. Does this mean we're going move in with you again?"

"No, angel." No, it's going to be rather the opposite, actually, and you probably won't see me much at all anymore. Your mother and I will try to act normal, probably, and will indubitably fail, because everything is different now. But he couldn't say that to her. Something in her demeanor piqued his interest, and he realized that she was worried. He squatted down to see at her eye level and put his hand on her little shoulders. "But if your mummy ever acts like that again, you can come tell me, and I'll take care of it. You can always tell me anything, alright?"

"Okay," and then her pudgy little arms were around his neck in a fierce hug, which he easily reciprocated. "Now, what do you say about the swings?" He asked with a forced smile as he pulled away. "I do believe they've missed you."

**

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**

"Playing" was not exactly Draco Malfoy's thing. It never had been, even when he was a child; it was too juvenile, too feminine, and too innocent. Nonetheless, when Rose called the pair back into the house for lunch, he was playing, if somewhat absently. He gave Gwen a piggy-back ride to the kitchen, but couldn't muster the energy nor the will to add the customary sound affects.

"I've put some vials of dreamless sleep in the medicine cabinet, and there are some frozen casseroles with directions on them in the freezer-cabinet. Gwen, eat with a fork like a big girl, please."

And then she'd taken her place at the table across from them, and he ate his first meal in weeks. He didn't taste the food, but it was food, at least, he knew, and knowing her, it was laced with all sorts of nutrients.

"You said something about papers?" He prompted between bites.

She nodded, but gave a pointed look to her daughter. "We'll talk about it later," she said, and he understood what she meant, and knew they wouldn't have to wait long, for Gwen still liked to take her afternoon nap, as he recalled, and would more than likely collapse soon.

Sure enough, the little girl had crawled up and fallen asleep in his lap before he was done with the simple meal. He lifted her easily, meaning to carry her to the spare room, but then Rose took her from his arms. "You eat more," she ordered. "I'll be right back. I have some forms for you." She made it halfway to the door when she turned around. "And I'll keep your secret," she added as an afterthought.

He didn't get a chance to ask her exactly what she meant, for then she was gone. He washed the dishes and was putting them away again when Rose returned, and wordlessly helped him clean the rest of the kitchen.

"What secret did you mean, exactly?" He asked finally.

She gave him a small smile. "That Gwen is your favorite grandchild. I know you're not supposed to have favorites, but don't really mind, as I'm rather partial to her myself, given that she's _my_ daughter and everything."

"I love all my grandchildren equally," he protested weakly.

She shook her head. "I know you do, but that's not the same thing, is it? Gwen is your favorite. It's okay, though; she was mum's favorite too, I know, although mum would never say so."

"She's an extraordinary little girl," he admitted, as if it were the same thing, but he couldn't bring himself to look at her.

Rose nodded slowly. "Sometimes, though, I worry about her... she hasn't had a normal childhood. She's strong for her age, I just... wish she didn't have to be." He thought about the child who worried that her mother would relapse into despair, and he privately agreed. "And it's not fair, really, that of all the children, she has the fewest memories of Patrick, when he was herfather."

He heard a sniffle, and looked up to find her crying. "I'm sorry, I'm fine," she lied, pulling tissues from her back to blot her eyes. "I didn't come just to cry on you, I'm sorry."

He looked at her a spell, and the finally allowed himself to ask his question. "Does it ever go away?" He asked.

She sniffled. "Does what ever go away?"

"The grief." The word was simple, but a knife in the air.

A few more silent tears dripped from her eyes as she shook her head. "No," she told him simply. "It gets... easier, to live, day by day, but it doesn't go away. And the worst isn't even reminiscing on the sad days; the worst is when it hits you, suddenly, unexpectedly. Like the mornings when I've just woken and wonder why he isn't in bed, and then wake up a little more and remember, and the days when I think I'm doing just fine, and then see a car like the one we had or a man with a baseball cap like the one he loved so, and its back to square one. And that day... do you remember that day I went shopping with Gwen when we were still living here? We were supposed to meet you and mum for ice cream after we picked up some books and stopped by Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes to see Fred and George.

"But it was crowded, and I Gwen got away from me. She ran after a man that looked like Patrick. Listening to her scream for him, over and over again, and not being able to find her, was horrible. And then I did find her, and had to pull her away from some random wizard as she sobbed was worse. She told me everything would be okay again, because I was right, and she did see daddy again. That was worse still. And then pulling her away from a wizard who looked like Patrick as she screamed at me, and then told me that she hated me... that was the worst.

"You don't expect things like that to happen and set you back, but they do, for days. And then it's like it just happened again, and it's like being in one of those circle's of Dante's hell, where the demons rip you apart just as soon as you've healed, except you don't even deserve it. And yet, somehow, it manages to get easier, and the hole is still there, and it's a still a gaping chest wound, but the edges of cleaner, somehow, and it becomes an ache and not a throbbing pain."

They sat in silence a moment more. He did remember that day; when they finally got to the ice cream parlour, Gwen was still sobbing and trying to wrestle her way out of her mother's hold while screaming for her dead father, while Rose, in turn, looked thoroughly horrified, and barely functional. He'd been given the task of explaining to Gwen that when Rose had said she'd see daddy again one day, she'd meant in a very, very long time. Rose had just cried on her mother's shoulder.

"It'll be different for you, of course," she qualified. "I mean, Patrick and I just had a handful of years. They were good years—ridiculously good, in fact—but there were only a few of them. You and mum, though... you and mum had decades. You had a full life together."

He shook his head. "Don't discount what you had with Patrick. You waited so long for him—you wouldn't settle, though you had a fair number of wizards willing to offer you a nice, safe, life. And then you met him, and that was it. You mum and I... we knew. She was so happy you'd found him, and that he accepted you. You may have only had a few years with him, but you loved him."

She shook her head. "You and mum had a life together. We just had a few years, and this big promise of a life together."

"He was the love of your life, Rose. Don't think your grief is any less than mine just because you weren't with him as long as I was with your mother; it's different, but not less. You'll be single for the rest of your life. We both will. They were irreplaceable. Your life will just be a lot longer than mine." It suddenly struck him, despite the ache the conversation was giving him, that it was perhaps the most pointless argument he'd ever had with the girl. They might as well be comparing battle scars around the campfire while getting drunk. It didn't matter, though, so long as they weren't talking about the ache itself, and what it felt like to lose his wife. That, he could not do.

She shook her head suddenly, and the tears welled up. "Don't say that! You can't... you have years left..."

He, in turn, shook his head at her. "No, Rose. No, I don't."

She hit the table, tears falling freely. "You have to! I still need you! You can't go too! What about Scorpius, and Hugo, and Gwen?" She set her head on the table to sob a moment, and he looked up, towards the light. After an age, she lifted her head back up and wiped the tears from her eyes. It was clear, suddenly, that she planned to ignore the issue of his mortality.

"I'm sorry, I didn't come here just to argue with you and cry," she apologized. "I've got... I've got a form I need you to sign," she said, suddenly distracted as she shifted through the contents of her bag.

"What's this?" He asked, as she handed a small stack to him.

"I put sticky notes on the pages where you have to sign," she replied, not at all answering the question.

He looked at the papers for himself. Verification of guardianship. He looked up at Rose in shock. "What?" He croaked.

She rolled her watery eyes as best she could. "I know, it's ridiculous, but now that... well, now, if anything happens to me, Gwen will go to Patrick's sister, because she's the godmother, never mind that you and mum were listed as guardians in my will."  
He looked up at her with wide eyes. She couldn't possibly mean what he thought. "You... still want me to be her guardian?"

She looked as if she had been slapped. "Of course!" She stalled. "Unless... unless you don't want to be" And then she reached a false realization and the words spewed from her. "Oh, Merlin, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have just assumed... I should have asked, should have discussed... I just thought you'd still want her, even without mum to help you raise her, even without the blood tie between us... I'm sorry, I shouldn't have."

He gulped, shaken by her admission, stunned with the realization that she still wanted him to take her daughter, should anything happen to her, regardless of the blood ties. Perhaps the family they had built together was stronger than he thought. Perhaps it wouldn't fall apart. But no, he wouldn't let himself have grand expectations. The only thing he could count on was the fact that she wanted him to take care of Gwen if anything happened to her, and that, he could do, and gladly.

And so, with a flourish, he flipped through the document, affixing his name with perfunctory panache beside every sticky note.

When he was done, he looked up at her, only to find that her eyes were shining with unshed tears.

"Oh...." she gasped. "Oh, oh..."

"Rose?" He moved to put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but she shook off his touch as she looked at him in horror.

"You don't get it," she whispered with awed dismay. "I thought.... I thought you understood..."

"Rose?" He asked again, for she simply wasn't making sense.  
"... Draco, even.... even without her, you're still... more than a friend... I mean, you're my dad...." And all at once, he realized that she was terribly afraid he would rebuke their relationship, for she didn't know that she was as dear to him as he was to her.

"This changes things," he said simply, because it didn't matter that that he loved her, because she was someone else's daughter, and the link that had made her his daughter as well was gone.

She gulped, glanced at the clock, and got up. "Ron was my father, but only biologically; he was never a good father to me, even before he married Lavender Brown and became more concerned with his new family," she told him, and though he'd suspected as much, he now added the neglect of his daughter to his list of reasons he hated Ron Weasley. "You've been the father figure in my life since I was thirteen years old; that's not going to stop just because things are different now. I refuse to let them. And I'd love to stay and tell you as clearly as possible that I'm your daughter, biology be damned, but I have an appointment with my grief counselor. Just remember that, though; this changes things, but not everything."

She walked away on shaking legs and then paused at the doorway. "I'll see you later," she promised. "And you better have eaten well when I get back," she added, and then, she was gone.

He went to the sitting room, where she'd left Gwen sleeping. He almost hoped she would have forgotten to collect the little girl, but he knew it was a foolish hope; as long as she was sane, Rose remembered Gwen. There was no trace of Gwen in the sitting room; no blankets disturbed, no stuffed animals left behind, not even a dent in the couch.  
He shut the door, and then made for the kitchens again. On an impulse, though, he went upstairs, to the nursery. The room hadn't been opened in months, not since they'd moved out, but he still had the house elves clean it. The adjoining room her mother had lived in had been all but bricked it, filled with as many unpleasant memories as it was.

In the middle of the pink princess bedroom, Draco Malfoy wept.

He remembered shopping with Gwen, after Rose had her meltdown and Gwen had run through London for help. She had only been six, but had managed to find her way to the Potter's, a few streets over. Lily had carried her back to the house, and had been the one to discover Rose passed out on her bathroom floor.

He hadn't seen her like that, though. In fact, he'd hardly seen her at all during the week she spent at St. Mungo's. He'd seen her more after they discharged her, and it was decided she would move into Malfoy Manor to be taken care of. While the women worried over Rose, Gwen was thrust into his not altogether capable hands.

His first task had been to get her room ready. He suspected his wife had meant to get the sheets and towels washed and move her things in, but that didn't quite suit him; instead, he took the little girl shopping and let her decorate her room to her heart's content. The interior decorating was childish and haphazard at best, with more of a medley of things Gwen liked than an actual scheme, but it was her room. He had spent hours playing with dolls and making crafts with the child in this room while her mother sobbed on the other side of the wall. He hadn't been able to help Rose, but he could take care of Gwen.

He liked that he could make her happy. He felt if he made her happy enough, it would negate the image he had in his mind of her running through Godric's Hollow in the wee early of the morning with her barefoot exposed to the light frost on the ground, sobbing because her mummy wouldn't wake up, dressed in only a pink Barbie nightgown despite the frost on the ground. And yet, in the end, all the toys and books and games had proved too weak to distract her enough, and she still often asked for her mummy. He'd always lied to her and told her that her mummy was just fine, until he realized that once she got over worrying that her mummy was ill, she worried her mummy didn't love her anymore, and that's why she didn't get to see her.

"Poppy?" she whispered one night as he was tucking her in.

"Yes, angel?"

"Can you do anything with magic?"

He smiled. "Almost anything."

She chewed her lip, and he could tell that she was thinking deeply. He pulled the blanket over her and kissed her forehead, still waiting for her to ask her questions. He steeled himself; her questions were usually difficult.

"Do you think I'll have magic like mummy, or be a muggle like daddy?"

He relaxed; the question was easier than he was expecting. "I don't know, angel, but no matter what you are, you will be loved, no matter what," he promised.

She mulled over that shortly. "If I have magic, do you think I'll be able to bring daddy back so maybe mummy will be happy and love me again?"

He was shocked. "Angel, your mummy still loves you, very, very much."

She shook her head. "Mummy knows it's my fault daddy died. I was being loud when he was driving. That's why she won't see me anymore."

He realized she was fighting her tears at her confession, and he wanted to weep as well, or maybe punch whatever cruel fate had decided to punish his sweet granddaughter. He fought to remain cool and pushed her hair from her forehead absently. "Gwen, what happened was not your fault at all, and no one blames you. Your mummy won't see you anymore because she doesn't like for you to see her cry, because she's very sad, that's all."

"Do you promise?" She whispered, her voice quaking with the threat of tears.  
"I promise." He kissed her forehead. "Don't worry about anything, angel, just go to sleep. Sweet dreams."

There was silence as he crossed the room, flicked on her magical night light, and then went to the door. "I love you," she said suddenly, hesitantly.

He turned around and smiled at her, trying to not look so sad. "And I love you." He turned off the lights and shut the door, then, and made his way through the dark hallway to her mother's room. He needed to have a little talk with his step-daughter...

He hadn't understood then about her grief. He'd only experienced a handful of deaths in his life: his favorite teacher, his parents, some of his superficial friends. He'd liked his son-in-law reasonably well, and had shed a tear when Patrick died, but he hadn't wanted to tear out his hair, either. He'd been more concerned with his daughter and granddaughter in the hospital. He couldn't imagine, then, what forces were causing her to act so irrationally, causing her to neglect her tender daughter, for it had to be some amount of insanity. He couldn't imagine grief alone reducing the strong-willed girl he had known to a miserable mess of tissues and tears.

But now he understood.

He honestly didn't know why he even bothered to keep waking up in the morning. He cried only rarely, but when he did, he cried ceaselessly for hours, until he passed out from exhaustion and the house elves found him lying dehydrated on the floor. Without her, he had nothing. There was no more sunshine, no more joy. He felt like his senses had died; his fingers touched without feeling, his tongue swallowed without tasting, his eyes saw but without a concept of aesthetic appeal. He felt like a shell of a man, like a victim of a dementor's kiss, and he couldn't really bring himself to care.

**

* * *

**

He was lying on the floor of the closet when she walked in. She stopped at the door, and he could feel the questions forming in her mind, battling for dominance, but he didn't bother giving her time to ask.

"It still smells like her," he explained lazily, his eyes still closed. "I know she would want you to have her old clothes, and I know you'd like to find the same warmth she did in her old sweaters, but I'm not ready to part with it yet. Any of it."

She sat beside him and glanced around the closet. When it had belonged to Narcissa Malfoy, its contents could have rivaled that of any department store. Now, however, it was comparatively empty; Hermione had never been one for an excessive wardrobe, and she had always suspected, quite correctly, that her husband had more clothes than she did.

It smelled like her. It smelled of her favorite perfume he'd always given her, and the lavender posies she kept in her shoes when she wasn't wearing them, and there was the vaguest scent of cinnamon in the air, courtesy of her unnatural predilection for using far too much of the spice in her baking. It smelled warm and comforting and wonderful.

"The house elves told me you've been sleeping in the guest room when you do sleep at all," Rose told him quietly.

He didn't bother opening his eyes. "I can barely look at that bed anymore, much less sleep in it," he confirmed.

She couldn't deny that walking through the bedroom to the closet had unnerved her a bit, but that wasn't the primary cause of her concern. "I'm more worried about that "when master sleeps at all" part," she informed him.

"I'm not a child; I no longer require nine hours of sleep."

"But you're not twenty, either, so I imagine you need more than two."

He didn't say anything more, and neither did she. She'd never known him to give up a chance to say something snarky, and his reticence was unnerving. Lying on the floor of her mother's closet was unnerving. Talking to him in this state was unnerving.

"I brought you something," she finally remembered. He listened as she rummaged through her bag. He imagined she would have brought that awful oversized pleather bag she always carried around. He knew for a fact that she'd been given a number of smaller, more fashionable purses over the years, as he'd given her several of them himself, but she never seemed to give any of the others more than the requisite one-time-use in the presence of the giver. She was appallingly like her mother in that sense.

"Sweet Merlin, not a book," he muttered as she passed it to him.

"Only technically," she supplied.

A picture of his wedding smiled up at him from the cover. For a moment, looking at his young, radiant bride, he forgot to be sarcastic. She had been beautiful. She hadn't been _her_, with all that makeup and all the beauty charms, but she had been beautiful, and for a moment he couldn't breathe, because for a moment, the pain of losing her stabbed into his gut once more.

"A photo album," he finally scoffed.

"No, a scrapbook," she corrected, and he groaned, because that was worse. "You don't have to look at it now, if you don't want to. My grief counselor said that eventually, everyone wants to remember, and so when you're ready, it's here for you. All of it."

He looked at her. "Even—"

"Even the Hogwarts years."

He was stunned and yet pleased. "But we hated each other then."

Rose smiled. "Yes, but I included those pictures—the ones I could find, at least—because they still defined your love story."

He snorted in the half-hearted fashion he usually did when others mentioned "love stories". It was a lifelong habit formed from incredulity that had eventually died when he re-met Hermione, but the habit survived. It was part of his snarky façade. "How do you figure that?" He challenged.

"Because it defined how you approached each other later, when you were willing to forgive and forget. It was your history together."

"I see."

"Plus, I have a theory that beneath that veneer of hate you secretly wanted to get in each others' pants."

"Rose!"

She at least had the decency to blush, he noted. "What?" She asked defensively. "It's true! Well, maybe-probably," she amended. "It's like how some people who are overtly cruel to homosexuals are secretly just terrified of their own sexuality themselves, and they think that maybe by convincing the rest of the world that they couldn't be that way at all, they won't be."

He rubbed his temples. "Trust me, I had not yet reformed enough to have any feelings for your mother."

"Whatever you say," she replied, obviously still set in her convictions. "Oh, but I also added the Hogwarts pictures for a more personal reason: looking at pictures of you and mum from back in the day is really quite amusing. You were quite the emo-goth kid. Let me guess: no one understood you?"

He sneered at her. "I was quite handsome."

She snorted. "And scrawny."

He shot her _the _look. "Careful, my dear: you may be family, but I can still hex you."

"Never bite the hand that brings you presents!"

"Funny," he drawled. "But I would have sworn that wasn't quite the expression, and I'm rather sure the present is unwanted."

"I adapted it," she supplied. "And you may not want it now, but you will, eventually."

"Because someone with a degree in psychology said so?"

"Because I know so, because after the accident, I convinced Gwen she was having nightmares so I could sleep in her room with her and avoid our room as much as possible, because I couldn't move any of his stuff, but at the same time, I couldn't stand seeing it. And so I had to avoid nearly everything in that house and it all but drove me insane. But after the breakdown, mum and I made a scrapbook about those few short years we had together, and it still hurt, but it was comforting. It was nice, to remember the good times, and not just dwell on the fact that the good times were gone."

He looked at the book in his lap again. There had been plenty of good times, he knew. He liked to think he had kept her happy, at least decently so. He, for one, had been horribly, uncharacteristically happy. This, he supposed, was God giving him the bill; he had loved her, and lost her.

But he wasn't ready to open the book. He wasn't even ready to sleep in their bed again yet, and he wasn't sure he'd ever be ready to do _that _again, not after he'd lost her in that bed. Being on the closet floor was just a fluke, he decided. He had needed a tangible reminder of her that didn't hurt as terribly as the other reminders scattered around the house. The closet, in comparison to the rooms she'd decorated and the tables they'd shagged on when the children weren't come, was mundane; it was hers, but it was not notable. It was, then, relatively safe.

The pictures would not be.

"Can I see yours?" He asked, evading. He didn't expect her to have it. He expected it to be a segue to a conversation about her instead. But instead, for some reason, she had the damn scrapbook tucked away in that damn oversized bag.

Her wedding photos were on the cover. Apparently, she hadn't been very original with cover art, not that he cared. She looked over his shoulder as he flipped the pages, through a few photos of them as children, from tiny chubby babies to recalcitrant teens. His pictures, probably supplied by his mother, didn't move. Hers did. Draco couldn't decide which was better.

He gave her a questioning look when he came across pages of them with other people. His prom with another girl. Her Yule ball with another boy. Nearly a dozen pictures chronicling their dating history. She was a strange girl, she was, he decided.

She finally caught his questioning look. "What?" She asked defensively. "I'm not exactly eager to think of him with other women, but it was a reality of our lives. And think, what if I'd settled for this bloke here?" She pointed to Terry Boot's son. He shuddered. _Rose Boot_. Thank Merlin she hadn't settled for him; the horrible jokes would have written themselves. "Everything would be different. Every failed relationship was a step in the path for _us_."

She looked at him with a peculiar look in her eye. He braced himself; he knew when he mother looked that way, she was about to release some sort of important decision or realization. "Did I ever tell you that you and mum inspired me?"

"Inspired you to what?"

"Never settle."

He gave her a look of his own. "And how, exactly, did we do that?"

"Well, like with Henri Zabini; I came _frighteningly _close to marry that pounce, just because I was nearly thirty and still single. Remember how you and mum would try to set us up? You'd have dinner parties for our family and theirs, and he and I "just happened" to be the only single people there, and he was nice enough and seemed to like me despite not liking being thrust at me, and we did date a while. And then at one of those dinner parties he was holding my hand during after-dinner coffee and you and mum were talking and I suddenly realized that I would never have what you had with mum with him. At the very most, we would be like mum and Ron, and I didn't want that, even if he hadn't cheated on her and ruined everything."

His breath caught in his throat. "And... did you have what we had with Patrick?"

She sighed. "I don't know. I don't know exactly what you and mum had; I had the outside perspective on you, and the inside perspective on Patrick and me. But I do know that I did not simply settle for him, and that I would still do it all over again, even if it were going to end the same way, and I'm glad—so, _so _glad—that I waited, because it was worth everything."

It was the best, strangest compliment he'd ever received, he supposed, and the weight was rather staggering; _he _had inspired her to wait for Patrick, and knowing what Patrick had meant to her, that was the biggest compliment she could possibly give anyone. He didn't quite know what to say, so he squeezed her hand slightly and tried to pretend he wasn't as affected by her words as he was.

He went back to looking at the book. He finally got to pictures of them together, and found a menagerie of images, both magical and muggle. He was astounded by the number of pictures of them from before they married alone; that year and a half of time covered as much space in the book as the previous twenty-something years.

He was shocked at how happy she had been. He knew, of course, she had been happy, but had somehow forgotten she was _that _happy. It was almost sickening.

Her wedding took up the next few pages, and then there were a few years of their married life, then Gwen's birth, then four more years. His obituary was on the last page, but there were plenty of blank pages behind it.

"It's not finished," she supplied, though he didn't ask when his gaze stayed fixated on those blank pages.

"It's not?"

She shook her head. "Because that's not the end of us. I mean, he's passed on, but I'm still here, still holding on, because it doesn't register all at once that he's gone, and its kind of like a non-necrophilia posthumous romance. Like when we were in the car after the crash, and I could hear Gwen and she managed to tell me that she wasn't hurt as she cried, but Patrick wouldn't respond and I couldn't move, just held his hand and screamed for him, not realizing that their was no pulse in his fingers beneath mine, and that he had died on impact. And then waking up in the hospital and asking for him because I still didn't realize what had happened. And then waking up nearly every morning for months afterwards and wondering why he'd gotten up early and without waking me before _remembering_. Because he's still everywhere and I still love him, and it's not over, not really, and it won't be until I'm gone too."

The horrible thing about her, he realized, was that she was always right when he didn't want her to be.

"So if I were to open my book, I would find...?" He asked hesitantly.

"Pages left for your grandchildren's graduation pictures and wedding pictures and even space for your great grandchildren's birth, and if all the grandchildren multiple like Hugo and Serena, then I'll add pages. They're all part of your life with her."

He handed her book back to her and looked at his own. He'd never imagined he could ever be so terrified of something with lace on it. He didn't think he could handle looking at his own wedding photos.

"I've got to go run some errands before I pick up Gwen from Scorpius's," Rose announced as he sat on the floor, still quietly reminiscing. "Scorpius insisted that he and Irene babysit for me today. I think he and Hugo have an arrangement to watch her for at least a few hours on alternating weeks, but they don't want to tell me that they're trying to be fatherly figures for her because they think that would set me off." She frowned, then remembered him. "Sorry for the tangent. Anyway, I'm going to go. You can go hide that somewhere out of the way where you'll ignore it just as well as you can ignore any elephant in the room, and I'll see you later."

She hugged him goodbye and left him still on the floor of the closet. He wished Hermione had known that it was _their _love that had inspired Rose not to settle. He wished he had told her he loved her more often. He wished everything had been different. And, for the first time in months, he wished he had more time.

**

* * *

**

Gwen shuffled into the living room not long before noon, still dressed in her pajamas and a robe. She sat beside her mother on the couch and curled into her arms. Rose kissed her forehead and held her closer, as if she were still a little girl.

"What are you looking at?" She asked, and Rose picked up the scrapbook again. Gwen traced her finger over the letters on the cover. "They looked so happy."

Rose nodded. "They were. They were really, really happy."

"Were you and daddy that happy?"

Rose nodded again. "I like to thing so."

They looked at the pictures together silently. Hermione, with her horribly bushy hair as a child. Draco, with his horribly greasy hair as a child. Obviously, the wrong person had all the hair products. Then Hermione in scarlet and gold; Draco, in green and silver. Hermione and Ron; Draco and Astoria. Both notifications of divorce in the _Prophet_. Hermione and Draco, finally together. The wedding. The next few decades of bliss. Her death. His death.

"I can't believe you put that in here," Gwen breathed, tears threatening to spill again. It was too soon. Too, too soon. She wasn't used to handling grief the way her mother was.

"It's part of their life story together. Love and marriage isn't always the happy stuff; sometimes, it's feeling absolutely miserable and knowing that it's worth it anyway."

Gwen was quiet again. There were no more pages after the few pictures from his funeral. Rose hadn't had to add more pages; he hadn't lived to see any great-grandchildren, though Hugo and Serena's oldest was already expecting, and Gwen's graduation was the only one not chronicled in the book. Rose picked up the last photo from the coffee table, and Gwen watched as she slid it into place on the last page of the book. It was an unmoving picture of the double headstone, his half finally filled. And then, that was the end.

* * *

And that, my dears, really is the end, of a lot of things, actually. I've had fun in fanfiction, but now that this project is done, I'll be taking at least a short hiatus, if not a long one. Look for me on fictionpress, though, and keep checking here! I'm not gone for good yet, just in need of some prioritizing: college stuff is my priority right now; reviewing is yours (hint hint nudge nudge).


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